Western And Chinese Medicine Approach And Prof. Liu Qingguo’s Experience On Treatment Of Depression

Background:This master thesis presents Western and Chinese traditional medicine approach into diagnosis, differentiation and treatment of depressive disorders. Depression is one of the most common and difficult illnesses to treat. It manifests in feelings of emptiness, deep sadness or misery, loss of hope, and even thoughts of suicide. Combining the treatment of both, Chinese Traditional and Western medicine is another approach, that is included in the analyses in this thesis.Objective:The first aim of this thesis is to give an overview of different kinds of treatment for depression. We will first introduce different western medical treatment methods and Chinese Traditional Medical methods. Then we will present the difference in performance either using them as monotherapy or as in combination, with special focus given to Chinese Traditional Medicine using acupuncture. For this goal we reviewed all the papers that we could find on performance comparisons of depression treatments. The second aim of this thesis is to show that acupuncture can be used successively as a treatment of depression and present clinical cases reports.Methods:A review is performed on 29 articles, which are focused on performance differences on different treatments of depression. We searched for articles relating performance differences on depression treatments using acupuncture in all major databases:Medline, The Cochrane Library, Embase, PsycINFO, a major Japanese database, leading Korean acupuncture journals and all major Chinese journals through the Chinese Medical Psychiatry website. Our main focus is acupuncture as a treatment for depression. Therefore, we also described clinical case studies treated in Guoyitang University Hospital using Chinese traditional medicine.Results:Many studies report reduction of depressive symptoms for the patients treated with acupuncture whether using it as monotherapy or as an augmented treatment to western medication medical treatments. Almost all studies report that there isn’t any significant difference in performance when using acupuncture as compared with western medicine. In most of the studies western medications (antidepressant) are used as major western medical treatment. We found support where acupuncture is a preferred treatment since it does not have any significant side effects. This is in the case of pregnant woman, where western medical treatments will affect the newborn baby. The cases that we described are an example of successful treatment using Chinese traditional medicine. They were treated in the University hospital of Guoyitang clinic by Prof. Liu Qingguo with the principal of Kaiyutiaoshen method.Conclusions:We conclude that the Chinese traditional method acupuncture can be used for treating major depressive disorders. It is as effective as the standard western medical treatments, and since it has very little, next to no side effects, there are cases where it is actually the preferred treatment.