Li Xu continued to read the notes.
Elder Cheng repeatedly emphasized in his notes that the human body is a complex, organic whole.
The emergence of illness was simply due to an imbalance of yin and yang and the disarray of qi and blood.
The essence of acupuncture treatment was not to "jab" the needle into the lesion, but to stimulate acupoints to mobilize the body's own righteous qi and "correct" this imbalance.
Therefore, before administering the needles, one must first use the four diagnostic methods—observation, listening and smelling, inquiry, and palpation—to distinguish the yin-yang, exterior-interior, deficiency-excess, and cold-heat nature of the illness. This is what's commonly known in Chinese medicine as the "Eight-Principle Pattern Differentiation."
In short, it all came down to two concepts: "deficiency" and "excess."
Conditions are either deficient or excessive, and treatments are either supplementary or expository.
Supplement the deficient; expose the excess.
