The essence of traditional Chinese medicine is meticulous clinical practice; all its principles, knowledge, management and diagnostic technic directly come from clinical diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Gathered through thousands of years, the practical experience of traditional Chinese medicine and pharmaceutics is considered an effective shortcut in the treatment of virus diseases, especially nowadays, when there is nearly no other choice in this kind of treatment.
For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine acknowledged that virus diseases were the pestilential evil of the season”, which cased “wetness-heat” response of the body. Due to pestilential toxicity, the disease acts like wetness-heat; wetness belongs to yin and heat belongs to yang. Therefore, this etiologic factor has yin and yang double characteristics. It injures yin as well as yang, causing the yin and yang sides of the viscera vulnerable and injured to various degrees. There are dysfunctions in many aspects, with functional failure of visceral organs and death may be the final result. In recent years, more and more scholars recognize hepatophilic virus is difficult to eradicate; its hides in the body for months or years and the disease may relapse repeatedly with increasing severity. The wide spread of the disease and people having similar manifestations and intimacy in dissemination of the infection all coincide with pestilential diseases stated in traditional Chinese medicine.
The basic principles guiding clinical diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine are “diagnosis and treatment according to overall analysis of syndrome differentiation” and “organic conception as a whole”. They provide for us correct comprehension of the intrinsic nature of diseases, especially when the disease is due to invasion of external evil and the course of disease shows the mechanism of pathogenic development, that is ‘from superficial to internal, from shallow to deep’. They also explain the different stages of disease development and predict its developing tendency. They elucidate why traditional Chinese medicine aims at “simultaneous treatment of the cause and symptoms” and emphasizes the importance of “treating the cause” during therapy. These principles, applied to the understanding of the intrinsic nature and the changeable clinical presentations of hepatophilic virus diseases, are correctly used in the treatment of virus hepatitis which causes various clinical symptoms and signs and other extrahepatic system disease, with the “treating liver” drugs of traditional Chinese medicine.
Up to the present, many people think that there is no method to treat virus diseases. Similarly people also think that virus hepatitis can not be cured and so, they lose confidence and give up therapy. There are patients waiting pessimistically for long periods but repeated blood examinations show no improvement and they believe the outcome is only death.
The virtual condition is not so sorrowful. From the successful treatment of virus infections like measles, varicella, parotiditis and influenza with traditional Chinese medicine, a lot of experiences have been accumulated. This gives us strong confidence that there are certainly some traditional Chinese medicinal agents capable of controlling “hepatophilic virus disease”. In fact, from early times to the present, the infectious toxic evil that caused virus hepatitis had already been existing together with human beings and uninterruptedly forming various diseases to affect their health. In the course of treatment of liver disease, traditional Chinese medicine also gained much precious clinical experience. In treating stagnation of liver or icterus caused by acute or chronic liver diseases, the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine is unique and definite. At present, the clinical result of treating acute hepatitis, chronic active hepatitis and early sclerosis of liver or even hepatophilic virus diseases and many extrahepatic system diseases with traditional Chinese medicine is very ideal.
Therefore, once infected by hepatophilic virus, the patient must have confidence to fight against the virus to the last and at the same time he should pay attention to personal hygiene, avoid all causes that may injure the liver, correct dysfunction of visceral organs and should receive timely traditional Chinese medicine to expel the evil and support the vital energy, to sooths the liver and remove stagnancy, nourish yin and reinforce kidney, clear pathogenic heat and eliminate toxin with the aim of suppressing the growth of hepatophilic virus and to avoid their injury to various organs of the body. Normal metabolic process in the body may then be ensured.
By WONG Kwok Hung
19th September 2000
(Translated by Professor ZHENG Hua En)