On Standard Nomenclature of Basic Chinese Medical Terms(IV)

ETIOLOGICAL TERMSIn traditional Chinese medicine, etiology is commonly called "cause of disease". The various factors that may cause disease are called "pathogenic factors". In the past they were classified into three categories: "exogenous factors", "endogenous factors", and "non-exo-endogenous factors". In the modern textbooks this tri-causal hypothesis is not so widely used, while a new classification has been developed.

On Standard Nomenclature of Basic Chinese Medical Terms(Ⅲ B)

Blood in Western medicine and血〔xue〕inTCM refer to the same substance,but some writ-ers insisted the use of xue or hsueh for TCM be-cause the latter’s knowledge about blood is differ-

Comments on Nigel Wiseman's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (Ⅱ) ——On the Use of Western Medical Terms to Express the Concepts of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Mr. Wiseman believes that Western medical terms chosen as equivalents of Chinese medical terms should be the words known to all speakers and not requiring any specialist knowledge or instrumentation to understand or identify, and strictly technical Western medical terms should be avoided regardless of their conceptual conformity to the Chinese terms. Accordingly, many inappropriate Western medical terms are selected as English equivalents by the authors of the Dictionary, and on the other hand, many ready-made appropriate Western medical terms are replaced by loan English terms with the Chinese style of word formation. The experience gained in solving the problems of translating Western medical terms into Chinese when West- ern medicine was first introduced to China is helpful for translating Chinese medical terms into English. However, the authors of the Dictionary adhere to their own opinions, ignoring others＂ experience. The English terms thus created do not reflect the genuine meaning of the Chinese terms, but make the English glossary in chaos. The so-called true face of traditional Chinese revealed by such terms is merely the Chinese custom of word formation and metaphoric rhetoric. In other words, traditional Chinese medicine is not regarded as a system of medicine but merely some Oriental folklore.

How do medical students understand disease behaviors?Evidence from event-related potentials

Objective: To investigate how medical students process Western medicine(WM) terms vs. traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) terms and how this is impacted by analogical priming from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.Methods: The experiments were designed as a 2(TCM terms vs. WM terms) × 2(correct terms vs.incorrect terms) × 2(analogical priming task vs. non-priming task) scheme. A total of 26 medical students completed a non-priming judgment task and an analogical priming judgment task on medical terms. During the tasks, the participants were asked to make correct/incorrect judgments on WM terms and TCM terms, and their behavioral data and event-related potentials(ERPs) were recorded.Results: Behaviorally, the response speed and accuracy of WM terms were higher than those of TCM terms(both P <.001), indicating a prominent concreteness effect. Analogical priming shortened the response time to medical terms(P <.001), and the response time to TCM terms was shortened more significantly(P =.001). For ERPs, WM terms induced a larger P200(an early positive ERP component), a smaller N400(a negative ERP component), and a higher late positive ERP component, indicating superiority of attention adjustment, smaller-scale semantic activation, and a higher cost of late semantic analysis and integration. However, the analogical priming eliminated the difference between WM and TCM terms in P200 and N400 while maintaining it in the LPC. This suggests that WM terms are sensitive to analogical attention adjustment, and TCM terms are susceptible to analogical semantic integration.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that WM and TCM disease behavior terms may initially differ in concreteness or the use of a verbal-linguistic system. Analogy is more conducive to understanding TCM terms. This research provides important neuroscientific evidence of the difference in thinking between TCM and WM.