The answer to this question is…
Nothing!
Despite medical expertise that goes back many thousands years more than the accumulated medical knowledge that we have acquired in the West, traditional Chinese medicine has nothing to say about irritable bowel syndrome at all!
However, on further investigation, the reason becomes clear.
As suggested many times in this report, there is no such illness or disease as irritable bowel syndrome as the phrase itself is a blanket, ‘catch-all’ term that covers a wide range of symptoms as opposed to one specific condition.
Thus, traditional Eastern medicine adopts a completely different approach to dealing with IBS than would a Western doctor. Instead of trying to pull every symptom of IBS together under the same heading, Eastern medicine works by isolating and then treating each individual symptom separately.
In this way, every individual IBS sufferer is treated for exactly the symptoms that they personally exhibit, rather than being treated as just another person who has a medical condition of some sort.
This approach makes far more sense than does the approach of the Western medical establishment who medicate patients that suffer from IBS as if it is a single, recognizable condition.
However, traditional Chinese medicine will approach your problem in two slightly different directions.
Firstly, a qualified practitioner of Chinese medicine would isolate each individual symptom that you suffer from.
Secondly, because traditional Oriental medicine works on the basis of triggering your own healing mechanisms rather than introducing outside substances in an attempt to heal you, your practitioner will look for the source of the weaknesses that are causing those symptoms, because that is where treatment is needed.
Armed with this information, he or she can then design a suitable program of treatment for you.
For example, you might believe that constipation is constipation.
Chinese medicine would not agree with you however, because according to traditional Chinese beliefs, the root cause of constipation falls into one of two categories, either excess type constipation or deficiency type.
The first job would therefore be to decide what kind of constipation you have. Once your therapist has isolated which specific type of constipation you are suffering from, then and only then will they decide upon the most appropriate form of treatment.
To continue with the same example, there are two subcategories of excess type constipation, both of which are reported to respond very well to acupuncture. However, whilst acupuncture will still work for deficiency type constipation, the benefits will be slow to develop and it is more likely that your therapist will recommend different types of herbal remedies as opposed to acupuncture for deficiency type constipation.
From this simple example, you can begin to see how the approach of traditional Chinese medicine is radically different to that of the medical profession in the West.
Whilst this form of treatment is aimed at managing your condition rather than curing it, this is probably the only real similarity between the two methods of dealing with IBS.
Of course, the most important question is, how effective is Chinese medicine in treating irritable bowel syndrome?
The answer is, most sufferers report extremely good results from various different forms of traditional treatment such as acupuncture, Chinese herbal remedies and in some cases, a little-known practice called moxibustion (the burning of mugwort on appropriate acupuncture points of the body), although this latter treatment is used very rarely.
Whilst there are no doubt some people who are still suspicious or a little nervous of considering using alternative forms of treatment like traditional Chinese medicine, there is plenty of evidence that using acupuncture or acupressure can help deal with a wide range of medical conditions (including IBS) in a completely natural and non-invasive way.
Once again, if you want to find a suitable Chinese therapist or acupuncturist, use Google maps or the Yellow Pages to find someone in your neighborhood. All of these treatments and non-invasive, so you have nothing to lose by trying.
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