Zhang's Orthopedics Department

Zhang-style Orthopedics was founded by Director Zhang Peixiang, a fifth-generation inheritor of the Fuyang Zhang family's bone-injury tradition. The tradition has a history of more than 170 years, beginning in the Qing dynasty and combining medicine and martial arts. The hospital traces its origins to the martial injury tradition of Yiyuan Zhenren and Zhao Tinghai, and notes similarities to the lineage of the Tang-dynasty physician Lin Daoren's Secret Formulas for Treating Injuries and Mending Fractures. Its characteristic methods include small fir-bark splints, manual reduction, splint fixation, functional exercise and Chinese herbal medicine. It is listed in the third national and Zhejiang, Hangzhou and Fuyang intangible cultural heritage lists. More than 20 years after the department was established, the team opened the Zhejiang Zhang Peixiang senior traditional Chinese medicine expert heritage studio in 2012 and the national studio in 2014. Under Zhang's leadership, the team applies the tradition particularly to manual reduction of limb fractures and fixation with small fir-bark splints, and to individualized use of herbal decoctions and external plasters for degenerative spinal and joint conditions. The department undertook a National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine appropriate-technology project on external fir-bark fixation for extension-type distal radius fractures, receiving a Zhejiang traditional Chinese medicine science and technology innovation second prize and a Zhejiang science and technology progress third prize; the project was included in the national Tenth Five-Year Plan research program. The team reports one National Natural Science Foundation project, one Zhejiang basic public-interest research project, three Zhejiang traditional Chinese medicine science and technology projects, two monographs and more than 50 papers.