OUR APPROACH (1)

Vegan lifestyle has long been touted as a surefire way to promote health and wellbeing. Reports from the vegetarian converts, however, speak of markedly different things. Some rave at how healthy and light-weighted they’ve come to feel, while the others talk of increasing fatigue and the feeling of “sinking down”. These different individual reactions to a uniform diet pattern – vegetarianism – indicate that there are fundamental biophysical divides between people.

8 Constitution Medicine identifies and categorizes these divides into eight subsets, each of which is a particular ‘constitution’ (hence the phraseology, ‘8 Constitution’). This is not an arbitrary analysis of cutting-the-pudding-the-way-you-want variety, decided almost always on sweeping survey over a limited sample. Rather, it is an objective categorization of inborn physiological differences, rooted on the detection of a particular type of pulse signature emanating from radial artery.

Existence of 8 Constitutions is an observational fact. To ask as to how there could be eight distinct constitutions is another question and will not be dealt in this exposition. For our purpose, it suffices to say that the analysis of these biological categories has been conducted rigorously by the practitioners of 8 constitution medicine, who synthesized meridian theory of traditional oriental medicine and knowledge of western medicine to yield fine-grained investigation into the nature of each constitution and to discover therapeutic application of the theory. The concept of constitution medicine was announced in 1894, ten years before the discovery of hormone. 8 Constitution Medicine as a systematic medicine coalesced into its present form in 1962. Please refer to the separate entry titled ‘History of 8 Constitution Medicine’ for the detailed account on its historical development.

At this juncture, the following question should be forthcoming in your mind: what does it mean to be born with a particular constitution? What does it amount to having one constitution rather than another, biologically speaking?