Unprecedented reorganization of development history of traditional medicine: Part I

Abstract

According to the period development and the typical characteristics of medical stages, traditional medicine can be divided into six aspects: legendary traditional medicine, instinctive traditional medicine, witchcraft traditional medicine, empirical traditional medicine, theoretical traditional medicine and integrated traditional medicine. Among them, instinctive traditional medicine and legendary traditional medicine belong to the stage of ignorance according to the level of human cognition (“not knowing reason and result”, “only knowing result” and “knowing reason and result”). It belongs to the immature and hazy development period of human traditional medicine before it became “medicine” from the perspective of the development of traditional medicine, which can be summarized as the pre-medical period. Scientific understanding of traditional medicine and instinctive traditional medicine is helpful for people to understand and grasp the development of traditional medicine and even the whole medicine.