Doctors’Dilemma in Auspicious Pulse Diagnosis Represented in Ming-Qing Fiction

Auspicious pulse diagnosis/pregnancy diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine involves such issues as medical skills,narrative skills,family decency,and ethics.It is an excellent case for the exploration of ethical dilemmas in traditional Chinese medical practice.The early classical medical texts such as Su Wen(Basic Questions)and Ling Shu Jing(Spiritual Pivot Canon)provide a principle-based ethical guide for doctor-patient communication,while popular fiction such as Hong Lou Meng(A Dream of Red Mansions),Yu Mu Xing Xin Bian(Stories:Entertain to Enlighten),and Feng Yue Meng(Courtesans and Opium)in the Ming and Qing dynasties present literary examples for solving ethical dilemmas.This article will analyze these texts from three perspectives.First,the doctors in the text were subject to gender order and other delicate etiquette and customs,therefore were unable to make the diagnosis without embarrassing the patients and jeopardizing family decency.Second,the narrator tends to attribute pregnancy misdiagnosis to three reasons:incomplete patient information,doctors’poor narrative competence,and doctors’corrupted medical ethics.Finally,the Ming-Qing fiction proposes three methods to solve this moral dilemma:clear pulse reading,tactful speech,and taboo challenging.This discussion of moral dilemmas in pregnancy diagnosis in traditional Chinese medical practice can be used as a reference for the localization of narrative medicine.

A Protocol for Digitalized Collection of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM)Pulse Information Using Bionic Pulse Diagnosis Equipment

Pulse diagnosis equipment used in Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM)has long been developed for collecting pulse information and in TCM research.However,it is still difficult to implement pulse taking automatically or efficiently in clinical practice.Here,we present a digital protocol for TCM pulse information collection based on bionic pulse diagnosis equipment,which ensures high efficiency,reliability and data integrity of pulse diagnosis information.A four-degree-of-freedom pulse taking platform together with a wrist bracket can satisfy the spatial positioning and angle requirements for individually adaptive pulse acquisition.Three-dimensional reconstruction of a wrist surface and an image localization model are combined to provide coordinates of the acquisition position and detection direction automatically.Three series elastic joints can not only simulate the TCM pulse taking method that“Three fingers in a straight line,the middle finger determining the‘Guan’location and finger pulp pressing on the radial artery,”but also simultaneously carry out the force-controlled multi-gradient pressing process.In terms of pulse information integrity,this proposed protocol can generate rich pulse information,including basic individual information,pulse localization distribution,multi-gradient dynamic pulse force time series,and objective pulse parameters,which can help establish the fundamental data sets that are required as the pulse phenotype for subsequent comprehensive analysis of pulse diagnosis.The implementation of this scheme is beneficial to promote the standardization of the digitalized collection of pulse information,the effectiveness of detecting abnormal health status,and the promotion of the fundamental and clinical research of TCM,such as TCM pulse phenomics.

Taking the Pulse of Business

The government's latest survey finds that most Chinese enterprises remain upbeat about their future The more stringent macroeconomic adjustment measures China put in place earlier this year appear not to have hindered the growth and well-being of the country's enterprises. Most remain positive about the prospects for 2006.

Taking the Rural Pulse

A few weeks ago I joined a tour to Yunnan and Guangxi, two provincial divisions that are contiguous to each other and border on Myanmar, Laos and Viet Nam. Yunnan and Guangxi are in southwestern China, with a geographic location roughly like that of Arizona and New Mexico in the United States. Coincidentally, the combined territory of Yunnan and Guangxi, about 610,000 square km, is equivalent to the size of the two American states.