OUR APPROACH (3)

Oriental Medicine, rather than restricting its scope of analysis to a single organ, comprehends single organ as a part of broader system. Allegorically speaking, if heart is perceived as a ‘sun’ in western medicine, oriental medicine views it as a portion of ‘solar system’. Speaking in terms of western medicine, oriental medicine is more interested in circulatory system itself rather than the heart organ that is part of the system, and understands the latter’s role in the context of the operation of that broader system. To refer to ‘heart’ in oriental medicine, therefore, is to encompass the comprehensive reach of heart’s myriad functions. In a like manner, oriental medicine views skin – dermis and epidermis – as belonging to the greater system that centers on lung. Skin breathes in oxygen and emits carbon dioxide, and serves as the body’s first line of defense against external debris. Oriental medicine classifies such functions as broadly belonging to the role of the system in which lung plays the axial role. In addition to the contextual approach to human physiology and anatomy, oriental medicine imposes the framework of intra-organ energy transfer upon said organ systems, monitoring the balance between organs in terms of Qi energy, the concept rather foreign to western medicine.

While the foci of their medicinal analysis rest upon different points, oriental and western medicine do not fundamentally differ from one another in understanding each organ’s role. Western medicine, helped by rapid advance in empirical science, strove to construct ever more detailed observation and investigation into individual organ structure. Oriental medicine, on the other hand, focused on relational attributes among multiple organs, studying to rectify communicational and cooperative defects among them.

8 Constitution Medicine in particular discovered that each organ is assigned an innate energetic position in relation to other organs at the birth. The ‘energetic position’ is determined by how strong a given organ is relative to other organs, and by the strength of organ I refer to how rigorously and energetically a given organ performs its functions – and as organic functions are interrelated, how one organ plays its role more dominantly or submissively in relation to other organs. What is highly interesting is that energetic positions of human organs are not chaotically arbitrary from one individual to another, but exhibits eight patterns. A particular organic energetic position pattern of an individual is hereditary and innate, and does not change throughout one’s life just as one’s DNA structure remains the same life-long.