According to doctors at the 2nd International Congress of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, the medicine of the new century will be an integration of Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine.
Chinese medicine takes a holistic, patient-based approach to pain.
One major approach is to treat disease by enhancing the body's in-built resistance to disease. For chronic complex problems, there are no specific causal factors, so the Chinese model is a useful model to deal with chronic problems. Hui said conditions such as fibromyalgia, low back pain, and carpal tunnel syndrome are easily treated using a Chinese medicine approach. Modern Western medicine is more analytic in its approach to treating disease, Hui noted. As such, a more complete type of medicine would be to combine both Chinese and modern Western medicine.