Thursday, November 19, 2009

UMHB: Introduction - Chinese Medicine Analogue to Information Technology (1)

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I still remembered an English story of A King Golden Touch story I read when I was a kid. Touch something and then it will become gold is a drive factor for Western science and technology. Whereas for Eastern, the Emperor was ambitious to look for immortal knowledge. These two different beliefs drive both study to different direction.

When I was a kid, in the book that I read, when it introduce a scientist, there will be always picture with lots of bottle of experiments. Before information industry boomed in late 20th centuries, the common perception of a scientist is usually a chemical scientist. Western medicine evolved from that background till today, from body check up to cure, it is all based on chemical logic, method and thus chemical medicine. Until today, Western medicine is a science to cure disease in chemical way. [MK: If you notice, disease is dis-ease :) ]

Chinese medicine has different approach in medication and cure. Each human body is a universe, and also there are other ideas like YinYang, and FiveElement (五行). These ideas was not built on a scientific proof, and is merely Metaphysics. Starting from 20th century, information and internet technology is evolving until almost everyone has to know at least the basic knowledge of it to stay connected.

Looking back at Chinese medicine, it is a way to describe a system, if we compare it with current information technology system. In this book, the author is trying to describe TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) idea using information technology.

[To be continue]

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