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Ancient pulse taking, complexions and the rise of tongue diagnosis in modern China
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
Arthur Worthington (1852–1916), a British scientist, and pioneer of the science of objectivity wanted ‘real (objects) as opposed to imaginary’ (Daston and Galison, 2007: 36).3 In China, the Chinese conception of the pulse was thought to be real. Across the seas, European scientists debated ‘the realness’ and therefore the value of the Chinese conception of the pulse, some drawing on the authority of its detailed descriptions to revive the old art of sphygmology, and others dismissing it as imaginary (Kuriyama 1999: 37; Jenner 2010: 650–1; Chapter 38 in this volume). Unsurprisingly, the pulse proved a topical debate. This raises important comparative issues which contextualises the rise in tongue diagnosis in China and subsequently worldwide. The pivotal point which led to the rise of tongue diagnosis, both in its availability and in its acceptability, was that there was no doubt that a tongue was indeed a tongue. It was a physical object that could be visualised, interpreted and communicated with significant ease compared to the pulse.
The Antidepressant Effects of Yueue and the Herbs of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Published in Scott Mendelson, Herbal Treatment of Major Depression, 2019
Western psychiatrists must also be willing to set aside their myopic skepticism and admit the possibility that the ancient Chinese perspective and inexplicable methods of diagnosis allow the discrimination of subtypes of depression – liver-Chi stagnation, heart yin deficiency, heart-kidney disharmony, spleen deficiency, liver-spleen disharmony – that respond to specific combinations of herbs (or polypharmacy) and not a single pharmacological “magic bullet.” At the same time, there is danger in romanticizing TCM, as research has revealed many of its own weaknesses and incongruencies. For example, the traditional methods of diagnosis in Chinese Medicine, such as pulse diagnosis, suffer poor inter-rater reliability.56 The ancient method of tongue diagnosis also has poor inter-and intra-rater reliability.57 There is also a lack of rigorous and comprehensive studies of the efficacies of the entire range of TCM treatments that would lend support to its basic tenets of diagnosis and treatment.
Analysis and recognition of characteristics of digitized tongue pictures and tongue coating texture based on fractal theory in traditional Chinese medicine
Published in Computer Assisted Surgery, 2019
Ji Zhang, Jun Qian, Tao Yang, Hai-Yan Dong, Rui-Juan Wang
Tongue diagnosis, as one of the special diagnostic methods in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), is a part of inspection diagnosis [1]. It is defined as a comprehensive diagnosis method for syndrome differentiation based on tongue color, tongue coating, tongue shape and sublingual veins [2]. The presentation of the tongue is believed to be closely associated with in vivo viscera, qi and blood as well as body fluids; tongue appearance can be used not only as an auxiliary diagnostic indicator for multiple diseases but also as an indicator for the self-monitoring of daily health [3]. In modern times, computer science and technology have matured, and the computer-assisted digitized management and analysis of tongue pictures has become one of the hot topics in the objectification of TCM tongue diagnosis [4,5]. Its study contents mainly include color-orientated analysis of tongue color and tongue coating color [6], geometrical morphology-focused analysis of tongue shapes [7], and texture structure-dominated analysis of tongue coat texture [8]. Currently, the analysis of tongue shapes and coating texture structures is limited by disadvantages in the digitized analysis of the objectification of tongue pictures because consensus cannot easily be made in field of standard classification due to a lack of complete mathematical data support in relative studies [9]. In the study fields of the objectification of TCM tongue diagnosis, there are less specific studies to analyze the tongue coating texture in tongue pictures [10]. Representative studies include the analysis of tongue coating texture in tongue pictures based on Gabor wavelet transform proposed by Dapeng Zhang [11,12] from the Harbin University of Institute, the analysis and recognition of characteristics of tongue coating texture in tongue pictures based on the nutrition statistical method proposed by Jiatuo Xu [13,14] from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the analysis of characteristics of greasy tongue coat texture in tongue pictures based on subspace method proposed by Baoguo Wei [15] from the Beijing University of Technology.