According to research, TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) had been very popular during the Qin and Han dynasties and many monographs on TCM were written, which are regrettably lost today. In the following dynasties, more medical writings came out successively, among which the “Sheng Nong's Herbal Classic” and the “Compendium of Materia Medica” are the most foremost and famous ones. Nowadays, TCM is still very popular among Chinese people even if the western medical technology produces effect faster. The most important reason for that is Chinese people believe that TCM makes less side-effect and pays more attention to health cultivation. For a long time, TCM impact exerts a deep influence on Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese medical science. Today, TCM is classified as alternative medicine as well as hypnotherapy, Homeopathic Medicine and others. In China today, courses of both western medicine and TCM are commonly provided in medical colleges, and students can even choose a college of traditional Chinese medicine where they have a chance to study more about TCM.

Theory of TCM

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an old Chinese medical science that has been being developed for thousands of years. Based on the Taoist theory of Yin & Yang, five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, earth) and other metaphysical belief systems, TCM treats a man as a combination of vitality (气qi, as the world origin in the ancient Chinese philosophy), body (形xing) and spirit (神shen) and diagnoses diseases by Four Diagnostic Methods, namely, 望 (observation of the patient's complexion, tongue, expression, behavior, etc.), 闻 (diagnose through auscultation and olfaction), 问 (diagnose through interrogation) and切 (pulse feeling and palpation). According to TCM theory, every part of a human body is interrelated with each other, just like ecosystem we know today, one part will get ill when pathological changes happen to other parts.

According to TCM theory, climate relates to human being’s health and it can exert an influence on people’s health when climate goes into a cyclic variation every 12 and 60 years. In recent years, scientists find that the variation is indeed has a close connection with the sunspot cycle (every 11 or 12 years). The sunspot activity can intensely disturb the geomagnetic field during the cycle and change the climate on the earth, which will make passive effect on human body and cause paroxysm of diseases.