A good knowledgeable Oriental doctor should have a solid medical background in both Western and Eastern medicine. They are mostly into saving lives through modern technology and science. I think it's interesting that if you look at what people eat, that tends to reflect the kind of healing they'll need. There are so many differences, although I think that we are seeing a melding, or a coming together of the two. The thinking is very linear, very cause and effect, and there tends to be a separation between the concepts of the person and their disease.
Eastern medicine is much more holistic and based on traditional philosophy.
It looks at health and disease as that we are integral parts of a whole that includes our environment, our community, our society, what we eat, how we live, our mental and emotional outlook, our spirituality. If there is an imbalance in any of the parts, our health will suffer. In the Chinese medical diagnosis, we are different from Western medicine. We call identification and treatment of a syndrome which means we are not treating a disease. We treat a group of symptoms, try to find out what balance is broken, and which organ is affected by its relationship to the symptoms.