Backtrack Study Of Professor Zhouzhongying's Asthma Cases Based On A New Syndromic Etiology Theory

[Objective] This dissertation explores Professor Zhou Zhong Ying's disease etiology and principles of asthma treatment. This study is based on Professor Zhou's years of asthma treatment cases, and it uses a modern data seeking technique. Also, it applies Professor Zhou's new syndromic etiology theory as a guideline. The study is hoped to improve the asthma clinical treatment and expand TCM knowledge.[Methods] This study accumulates Professor Zhou Zhong Ying's asthma-related cases over the past twenty years by closely following his long term clinical practice and collecting the data from his diagnostic database. The selected results are 87 cases with 447 clinical followups, based on analysis on multiple scale and muti-level-self-adjust-reasoning system, the data are organized in order to get frequency distribution, cluster analysis, associated condition and clinical examination factors. This study put emphasis on defining and analyzing the connection between syndromic etiology, pathogenesis and prescription, aiming to sum up the result and draw a conclusion.[Result] The 87 patients range from 82 years old to 2 years old, and the average age is 23.40 years old. Of the 447 clinical followups, the syndromic etiology frequency is over 20%, and they are phlegm, heat, deficiency, stagnation and wind. Among the combination of syndromic etiologies, the phlegm-heat has the highest frequency. As for etiology, phlegm-heat-stagnated-lung has the highest frequency, which appeared 121 times with the frequency of 27.07%; it is followed up by "deficiency of both qi and yin," "internal lung-heat stagnation," "wind-phlegm attacked lung," "wind pathogen invade upper jao," "internal phlegm-heat stagnation," "phlegm-damped upper body," "deficiency of both lung and kidney" and "lung and stomach both ill." Each of the above has the frequency over 5%. Professor Zhou Zhong Ying used nearly 300 herbs to treat asthma. Despite the variety of the herbs, Professor Zhou emphasized that the herbs should be used according to one's syndromes, and one herb may have multiple functions.[Conclusion] This study has found that the basic etiology of asthma is imbalance of zhang-fu and yin-yang, which causes the dysfunction of body fluid transport in lung, spleen and kidney, resulting in accumulation of phlegm in the lung and then becomes the main symptom of the disease. The 7 main etiologies of asthma are "wind," "cold," "phlegm," "stagnation," "dampness," "watery" and "heat." The clinical syndrome of asthma includes "phlegm-heat-stagnated-lung," "deficiency of both qi and yin," internal lung-heat stagnation," and "wind-phlegm attacked lung." As for prescription, Professor Zhou Zhong Ying is good at using certain specific herbs that dissolve phlegm, such as Zeqi.