Traditional Medicine Department

The Department of Traditional Medicine at Shuguang Hospital was the first clinical department in China devoted to comprehensive traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment, and has been rated an A-level department of the hospital for several consecutive years. Clinically it specialises in the comprehensive TCM treatment of miscellaneous internal diseases, and undertakes medical care, teaching and research on conditions in which TCM has particular strengths, on chronic diseases and on intractable diseases. It is the clinical teaching base with the strongest TCM character at Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a training base for senior clinical talent in traditional Chinese medicine.

The department was the first to break away from the current specialty divisions modelled on Western medicine, integrating Chinese internal medicine, acupuncture and moxibustion, tuina and rehabilitation across disciplines. Guided by a holistic approach and by syndrome differentiation, it applies comprehensive traditional treatment methods — Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, moxibustion, tuina, herbal fumigation and washing, auricular acupressure, herbal patching, collateral-pricking bloodletting and catgut embedding — to common, frequently occurring and intractable clinical conditions, as well as to TCM regulation of subhealth states. It is particularly distinguished in the comprehensive TCM treatment of respiratory diseases such as chronic cough and asthma, digestive diseases such as abdominal pain and diarrhoea, allergic diseases such as allergic rhinitis, chronic strain-related conditions such as neck, low back and leg pain, and chronic deficiency disorders. Care is individualised: according to each patient's constitutional characteristics and clinical presentation, the department upholds holistic TCM syndrome differentiation while drawing on modern medical investigations, combining "syndrome differentiation" with "disease differentiation" to design a personalised comprehensive TCM treatment plan and pursue the best possible clinical outcome. This traditional approach to modern diseases, with its distinct TCM character and strengths, has been unanimously praised by patients.

The department follows the principle of "renowned TCM physicians taking the lead, young TCM physicians taking charge", bringing together a group of young and middle-aged clinicians devoted to Chinese medicine, and has invited Professor Huang Jigeng, Professor Cai Gan and several other renowned national veteran TCM physicians as special consultants. In recent years it has completed 25 research projects at various levels, currently leads 3 projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, holds 1 national invention patent, has published 87 papers in domestic and international journals, has participated in or chief-edited more than ten monographs on Chinese internal medicine, has received a teaching achievement award from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and has been named a Shanghai demonstration base for clinical practice of traditional Chinese medicine, a municipal-level teaching team of Shanghai higher education institutions and a Shanghai teaching team for international education.