According to traditional Chinese medicine, PMS is most definitely classified as a valid gynecological complaint or disease. The good news is that Chinese doctors (including acupuncturists) have been curing women’s PMS for centuries if not millennia.
I will explain to you the diagnosis and treatment of PMS with Chinese medicine. You will learn what causes PMS and what you can do a bout it. I will be able to share with you a number of self-help techniques which can minimize your monthly discomfort. I have been specializing in the Chinese medical treatment of gynecological complains for 10 years, and I have helped Western women cure or relive their PMS. Chinese medicine cannot cure every gynecological disease, but when it comes to PMS, Chinese medicine is the best alternative I know. If a woman follows my advice, together we can cure or at least reduce her premenstrual signs and symptoms.
What is PMS?
According to The Merck Manual, PMS is a “condition characterized by nervousness, irritability, emotional instability, depression, and possibly headaches, edema, and mastalgia; it occurs seven to ten days before menstruation and disappear a few hours after the onset of menstrual flow.” When nervousness, irritability, depression and emotional instability or lability are the main symptoms, this disease is also referred to as PMT or premenstrual tension, and PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. In actual clinical fact the list of accompanying signs and symptoms is much longer than the one presented above. Some women’s PMS includes dozens of symptoms and complaints. In fact, more than 150 symptoms have been reported in the Western medical literature association with PMS. It is also true that, although the authors of The Merck Manual say PMS begins seven to ten days before each menses, in some women it may begin two weeks or more before each period. Though the symptoms of PMS vary from woman to woman, they do occur during a specific and relatively constant time of the menstrual cycle and have clear beginning and end.
The hallmark of professional Chinese medicine is what is known as “treatment based on pattern of discrimination”. Modern Western medicine bases its treatment on a disease diagnosis. This means that two patients diagnosed as suffering from the same disease will get he same treatment. Traditional Chinese medicine also takes the patient’s disease diagnosis into account. However, the choice of treatment is not based on the disease so much as it is on what is called the patient’s pattern, and it is treatment based on pattern discrimination which is what makes Chinese Medicine the holistic, safe, and effective medicine it is.
In order to explain the difference between a disease and a pattern, let us take headache for example. Everyone who is diagnosed as suffering from a headache has to, by definition, have some pain in their head. In modern Western medicine and other medical systems which primarily prescribe on the basis of a disease diagnosis, one can talk about “headache medicines.” However, amongst headache sufferers, one may be a man and the other a woman. One may be old and the other young. One may be fat and the other skinny. One may have pain on the right side of her head and the other may have pain on the left. In one case, the pain may be throbbing and continuous, while the other person’s pain may be very sharp but intermittent. In one case, they may also have indigestion, a tendency to loose stools, lack of warmth in their feet, red eyes, a dry mouth and desire for cold drinks, while the other person has a wet, weeping, rusty skin rash with red borders, a tendency to hay fever, ringing in their ears, and dizziness when they stand up. In Chinese medicine just as in modern Western medicine, both these patients suffer from headache. That I their disease diagnosis. However, they also suffer from a whole host of other complaints, have very different types of headaches, and very different constitutions, ages, and sex.
Thus, in Chinese medicine, the pattern describes the totality of the person as a unique individual. And in Chinese medicine, treatment is designed to rebalance that entire pattern of imbalance as well as address the major complaint or disease.