SIEMENS

What is good medicine? Since humans began to analyze their bodily functions thousands of years ago the answer has usually been: “medicine that heals.” Today, medicine has become a truly global science, in which researchers systematically seek to compare various medical traditions with one another. One of the most intriguing fields aims to combine Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) — two schools that couldn’t be more different, yet may also contain a wealth of new knowledge for one another.

“Our efforts to combine both traditions will present new challenges for medical technology,” says Shen Hong, who is in charge of Strategic Business Development at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Beijing. “For years, Siemens Corporate Technology China has been looking at ways of using modern technology in conjunction with TCM.” (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2009, Traditional Chinese Medicine Meets Western Technology).

Following years of research conducted in conjunction with leading Chinese universities, CT is now developing the first workstation for traditional Chinese medicine. In the future, this could provide TCM doctors with the same kind of computer-based support that doctors using Western medicine have long enjoyed. A database enables a quick description of symptoms. At the click of a mouse, users can enter acupuncture points on a 3-D depiction of the human body or put together herbal mixtures. “TCM doctors have been asking for such a system for years,” says Shen. “This planned system is intended to provide them with a solid new foundation for their work and to offer a platform to collect evidence of TCM’s effectiveness in diagnosis and treatment.”

This advance is urgently needed. Although more than 500,000 doctors practice TCM in over 3,000 hospitals throughout China, their tradition, which goes back thousands of years, is still regarded as unscientific in the West. Indeed, Western medical technology has not been able to incorporate many of TCM’s principles and treatment methods. Doctors still can’t agree on how acupuncture actually works, even though the treatment has been recognized widely outside of China. Western-oriented medical experts point out that the results are not reproducible. What may represent a fundamental problem for these doctors is regarded as a strength by Chinese experts, who realize that methods that work on one patient might not be effective on another. This fact is not new to Western scientists because it applies to many medicines, but it doesn’t make it easier to establish cause and effect when it comes to TCM. An additional challenge lies in the lack of basic data. Chinese doctors observe a wide spectrum of symptoms, but so far there has been no tradition of documenting these in as much detail as is done in the West.

Four Phases. “Before we can promote TCM in the western world, we need to answer some very fundamental questions,” says Shen. “This offers us an opportunity to go back and question our basic assumptions.” As a rule, medical treatments can be divided into four phases: a diagnosis is followed by a treatment and then aftercare. The fourth phase is prevention — and that’s precisely where the strengths of Chinese medicine lie. In TCM there is a much stronger emphasis than in Western medicine on identifying — at an early stage — which functions have been thrown out of balance. Whereas Western doctors are mostly concerned with healing sick patients, Chinese doctors concentrate mainly on preventing healthy individuals from falling ill in the first place.

This emphasis on prevention leads to less money being spent on medical treatments. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only five percent of people are completely healthy — but conversely, only 20 percent are truly sick. Three out of four people are classified as being “unhealthy.” People in this “sub-health” category are neither completely healthy nor seriously ill, but suffer from problems such as tiredness, headaches, dizziness or irritability. “Biochemically speaking, these people seem to be fine,” says Shen. “Western doctors wouldn’t find anything wrong with them.” Nevertheless, these common problems can cause a huge decline in people’s performance and quality of life, and they can be warning signs of more serious illnesses to come, such as heart disease or diabetes.

To combat these dangers, Siemens has teamed up with Chinese medical experts to develop a unique joint research project. At Southern Medical University in Guangzhou in southern China, Western and Chinese scientists have been examining “unhealthy people” for years. Together with Siemens, they want to discover how Western and Chinese medicine can benefit from each other. “The study will help us develop medical technology to diagnose and treat sub-health problems,” says Arding Hsu, head of CT China. “Our goal is to provide TCM with a better scientific foundation so that Chinese medicine can receive greater international recognition.”

n coming years, TCM doctors will be able to record detailed information about each diagnosis and the course of specific diseases on an IT platform that was developed for this purpose by Siemens. This new technology will enable scientists to build what will probably be the largest database for TCM-related knowledge in the world.

When the data needs to be evaluated, specially- developed algorithms will help identify specific patterns of function and effect. Says Hu Wei, Vice President of Southern Medical University, “This will not only help to advance research, but will also be a very good basis for our training programs.” In a further step, medical devices will be developed later on that comply with the standards of both Western and Chinese medicine.

The project will initially run for five years and is the first of its kind between a Chinese research institution and an international health technology company. In the future, the project will be expanded to include more partners. “This could become a key project for all of the research being done in this field,” says Shen. Scientists involved in the project seem to have already agreed on one point: that good medicine not only heals but also prevents diseases in the first place.