A brief on pain and its patterns in Chinese medicine

Abstract

Pain is the most common symptom in clinics. Therefore, the quality, time course and location of pain are important for the diagnosis and treatment. However, pain is very difficult to define, and it is one of the conditions poorly understood by the medical sciences. In Western medicine pain is often described in terms of a penetrating or tissue-destructive process and/or emotional reactions, but in Chinese medicine the pathogenesis and description of pain are different. It is described based on the theories and pathogenesis of Chinese medicine, and the patients’ feeling according to their languages and cultures. Thus, when taking the history and conducting physical examination in patients in China and treating them according to Chinese medicine, we have to know how these patients express and describe their pain when they go to clinics. This article will explain some terms and words in the Chinese language and their corresponding terms in the English language.