Professor Shao Changrong's Experience Using Western Auscultation to Aid TCM Diagnosis
Professor Shao Changrong was one of the pioneers in China of integrated Chinese-Western medicine for lung disease. Shao originally studied Western medicine, then responded to the national call to "study Chinese medicine as a Western-medicine physician," undergoing three years of full-time TCM study, and thereafter devoted himself to integrated Chinese-Western treatment of lung disease.
Shao had considerable clinical insights; he combined Western diagnostic methods with TCM theory, offering many new ideas for precise medication. For example, he was skilled in combining Western auscultation with TCM theory to judge which pattern a lung-disease patient's condition matched, so as to select formulas and medicines more accurately.
In diagnosing and treating asthma and other respiratory diseases, he used the stethoscope to judge the patient's condition. If wheezing was dominant on auscultation, Shao, having differentiated cold from heat, would increase the dose of lung-diffusing or spasm-relieving, anti-asthma herbs; if moist rales were also heard, he judged there to be phlegm-dampness and, when prescribing, increased spleen-fortifying, phlegm-resolving or lung-clearing, phlegm-expelling herbs. If a patient in remission had slight dry rales on auscultation, Shao would warn the patient to avoid susceptibility triggers and, while supporting the righteous and securing the root, moderately add wind-dispersing, pathogen-outthrusting and lung-diffusing, anti-asthma herbs.
The stethoscope of modern medicine helps clinicians understand respiratory patients' condition more precisely, exactly compensating for shortcomings in TCM diagnostic technique. Shao treated Western examination methods as a useful supplement to the four TCM examinations, providing an excellent reference for precise formula selection; we should learn from him.
Auscultation is a simple examination—noninvasive, inexpensive. If TCM physicians learn auscultation, they can better grasp patients' condition clinically and improve the precision of medication. Although Chinese and Western medicine belong to different theoretical systems, they also share common ground in many places. Conditions we cannot grasp through ordinary observation, listening, inquiry, and pulse-taking can be grasped through simple examinations such as auscultation—so why not?