Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is a distinct medical system that deals with the life-health-disease-environment relationship using holistic, dynamic, and dialectical thinking. However, reductionism has often restri...Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is a distinct medical system that deals with the life-health-disease-environment relationship using holistic, dynamic, and dialectical thinking. However, reductionism has often restricted the conventional studies on TCM, and these studies did not investigate the central concepts of TCM theory about the multiple relationships among life, health, disease, and environment. Complex network analysis describes a wide variety of complex systems in the real world, and it has the potential to bridge the gap between TCM and modern science owing to the holism of TCM theory. This article summarizes the current research involving TCM network analysis and highlights the computational tools and analysis methods involved in this research. Finally, to inspire a new approach, the article discussed the potential problems underlying the application of TCM network analysis.展开更多
基金FDCT013/2015/A1 by the Science and Technology Development Fund of Macao SARMYRG2015-00172-ICMS-QRCM and MYRG2016-00144ICMS-QRCM by the University of Macao
文摘Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is a distinct medical system that deals with the life-health-disease-environment relationship using holistic, dynamic, and dialectical thinking. However, reductionism has often restricted the conventional studies on TCM, and these studies did not investigate the central concepts of TCM theory about the multiple relationships among life, health, disease, and environment. Complex network analysis describes a wide variety of complex systems in the real world, and it has the potential to bridge the gap between TCM and modern science owing to the holism of TCM theory. This article summarizes the current research involving TCM network analysis and highlights the computational tools and analysis methods involved in this research. Finally, to inspire a new approach, the article discussed the potential problems underlying the application of TCM network analysis.