We are now in the middle of a pandemic that has caused serious health issues globally. In the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan in China, Chinese medicine came to the rescue of a city in total lockdown, turning around a desperate situation in a few weeks. Chinese medicine continues to be used in China for the current outbreaks but unfortunately all news of these efforts are now banned.

Around 1800 years ago a major epidemic occurred in China that devastated part of its population. A Doctor, whose family had been ravaged by this flu like disease, took up the challenge to create a new system of treatments for general and serious health problems caused by seasonal and epidemic conditions. He went further and developed treatment methods for the complex conditions that can linger after the initial exposure, where treatments were not given or wrong treatments were applied.

These treatment strategies have been used since that time for all seasonal and epidemic health conditions in China.

Modern Chinese medicine has been modified from the original Classical Chinese medicine to more closely parallel modern Western medicine and has lost the original precise diagnostic system and also modified the classical formulations according to modern research into herb actions. These changes have lessened the outcomes expected from classical Chinese medicine.

With the discovery of long lost documents form the classics of 2000 years ago, the practice of the original classical Chinese medicine is now possible, and it has been timely with the current pandemic, that treatments are again available from the Doctors of long ago who created a system of treatments born out of the devastation of the epidemics of their times.

Interesting articles and sites for practitioners:

• http://iceam.org
• http://iceam.org/courses/shanghan-lun/