Neijing Sleep Mechanism And System Theory

Sleep, occupying one-third time of human lives, is vital to let people keep fit. Up to now, people have paid wide abroad attention on sleep research. Reports indicate that sleep is able to improve the ability of the body's energy and intellect to recover and develop, and has close relation with growth, development, and metabolism of the body and memory. Researches on sleep have involved various fields, such as medicine, psychology, culture, comparative biology and spaceflight medicine, further have obtained achievements in physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and treatment, and developed general physiological knowledge on sleep. Nowadays, sleep disorders have become an essential problem disturbing human health in both body and mind, following the increasing of rapid life rhythm and psychological stress. For inducing people's attention on sleep and health, WHO identifies March 21 every year as"World Sleep Day". Modern medicine ignores the integration quality of the human body in their researches on mechanism of sleep and its related diseases in the research method of reducible-analysis, which focuses less attention on holism. For example, medications for treating insomnia usually act on central nervous system (CNS) directly and depress it in some degrees to make patients appear addiction, abstinence syndrome and hangover manifestations. To psychogenic insomnia, using sedatives leads to far from satisfactory but other new disorders. TCM sleep theories, formed special understanding to sleep itself and its related disorders with basic characteristics of mastering life rules from viewpoint of functions, holism, and progress of events, are essential parts in TCM theory system. There are sleep theories dominated by spirit, yingwei, and yinyang, etc. Since they have been formed respectively and scatteredly, not been integrated, and lack of systematization, it is difficult to take full advantage of them. Therefore, this research focuses on establishment of integrated TCM sleep theory system and its application in clinic and regimen.This research discusses and identifies TCM basic concepts related with sleep, such as mind, hun and po in five spirits, yingwei, five-zang organs, etc.; based on these concepts, collects three sleep theories in Neijing, i.e. spirit domination, yingwei, and five-zang organs theory, to explore and develop their connotation for initiative establishment of TCM sleep theory system; besides, further elucidates and demonstrates Neijing sleep mechanism in the way of statistics and analysis of medications related with sleep involved in the existing pharmaceutical classics come down from the past dynasties. Finally, further probes application of Neijing sleep mechanism into clinic and regimen according to its characteristics, which focuses on essence, qi and spirit three levels.This paper has three parts.First, it summarized research development of sleep mechanism in TCM and modern medicine. Though they have limitation, research and treatment of sleep and its disorders in modern medicine have really obtained lots of achievements in many aspects. Especially several generally accepted sleep theories...