A Descriptive Study Of The Researchs On Psoriasis From Ancient Words On TCM

For many years, scholars and practitioners of modern medicine have been searching for new prescriptions for curing psoriasis without much success. It is true that in the field of traditional Chinese medicine (or "TCM") there have been insufficient understandings of the desease in diferent periods of time.In spite of its limitations, TCM has its merits in treating psoriasis. It is hoped that the fine examples of prescriptions in TCM can still contribute to the clinical treatment of psoriasis in modern times.Based on a systematic search, collection, processing, and classification of ancient literature,this paper aims to provide some clues on people's understanding of psoriasis in different periods of time for future researches and studies.The paper starts with a presentation and review of modern researches on psoriasis, which shows how the disease has been studied from a variety of perspectives.Following the review, the main body of this paper is a descriptive study of the ancient research findings, which includes further studies in the following seven aspects:The first section introduces relevant names and symptoms; the second section discusses cause and pathogenesis, including theory of external cause, theory of internal cause, and theory of compound cause (or a mixture of external and internal causes); the third section deals with prescriptions and treatment methods, which is also the focus of the study. This section is subdivided into simple prescription research and compound prescription research. Altogether,81 kinds of simple prescriptions and 120 kinds of compound prescriptions have been summarized, which are respectively associated with 26 and 51 ancient works on TCM; the fourth section illustrates a series of case records, including those from Ming and Qing dynasties; the fifth section anylizes principles of treatment based on the different understanding of the disease in different periods of time; the sixth section summarizes the different versions of understanding from Sui and Tang dynasties down to Ming and Qing dynasties; last but not least, the seventh section points out potential problems and puts forward suggestions for the benefit of future studies.