Eastern Approach Vs Western Approach Essay

Within any cultural group when we speak of traditions we cannot omit the approach to medicine. The most distinguishable groups are Western and Eastern medical traditions which in the past were treated as two opposite clusters. Medicine in Western countries focuses on the theoretical and deductive methods and the Eastern approach uses the inductive method. The Western approach distinctly segregates the health of a person from the disease one suffers, hence the Eastern approach reflects health as a balanced combination of mental, physical and emotional spheres contrasted with a disease as an unbalanced state. The Western approach lean towards adaptation of the environment and the Eastern way, on the other hand, prefer to adapt to the environment. (Tsuei, 1978) Comparing those two approaches, we will come across a number of issues. The terminology, the teaching

Traditional medicine consists of all the medical knowledge systems which can be found in different societies and developed over generations before the era of modern medicine. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines traditional medicine as "the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness." Traditional medicine in East treats not only the physical body but also it’s surrounding in terms of energy fields, emotional sphere and spirit. Eastern approach sees the underlying reason of the disease in the misbalance of energy within the person, unlike the Western, modern, medicine which is concentrating on the physical aspects and tries to “fix” the body. One of the most exceptional sides of traditional medicine is its intention to imply the self-healing mechanisms pledged in our body by