Western And Chinese Medicine Approach On Treatment Of Cervical Spondylosis

Background:This master thesis presents Western and Chinese traditional medicine approach into diagnosis,differentiation and treatment of cervical spondylosis.Cervical spondylosis is one of the most seen clinical disorder.It is a chronic disc degeneration that develops either with age,or as a result of trauma or other pathological condition.Traditional Chinese medicine has been a good approach practiced by many TCM hospitals in china,therefore combining both western and Chinese medicine would be another approach that is included in the analysis in this thesis.Objective:This thesis firstly overviews different kinds of symptoms according to both Chinese and western medicine.Also it gives a detailed overview on its treatments using Chinese medicine and western medicine combines together.Thereby the western medical treatment is introduced followed by Traditional Chinese medicine methods.To treat cervical spondylosis traditional Chinese medicine can be used as a monotherapy as well as it can be combined with western medicine which has to be documented further.The main focus of the treatment using traditional Chinese medicine was on tuina,acupuncture and moxibustion.Secondly this thesis aims on showing that the acupuncture and tuina can be successfully used to treat cervical spondylosis and quite a number of clinical case reports were reported as well.Methods:We reviewed about 59 scholarly articles which focused on differences between effectiveness of the different treatments in treating cervical spondylosis.In this thesis many articles were searched and reviewed using acupuncture and tuina in the major databases,PubMed,PEDro,Google Scholar,Web of knowledge,Sciencedirect,Medscape,Library of the VUB,Medline,Pubmed,The Cochrane Library,CNKI,Embase,a major Japanese database,leading Korean acupuncture journals and all major Chinese journals through the Chinese Medical websites.The main focus of this thesis is treating cervical spondylosis using acupuncture,moxibustion,tuina,cupping and scrapping.Therefore,the clinical case studies that were treated in guoyitang university clinic using traditional Chinese medicine have also been described.Results:Many studies documented relieving pain and pain related symptoms for the treatment of cervical spondylosis using traditional Chinese medicine as a mono therapy or with combination of pharmaceutical medications are effective.When treating cervical spondylosis with TCM there are various types of therapeutical methods.Even though acupuncture,tuina and herbal medicine are the main types of therapies apart from those guasha,qigong,cupping and moxibustion are greatly effective to reach the recovery fatser.The TCM treatment methods are preferred due to the less or no side effects compared to the western medicine treatment methods.The clinical cases presented in this thesis are of the patients treated by Prof.Li Rui in the Guoyitang University clinic and have shown favorable outcomes when treating cervical spondylosis with traditional Chinese medicine.Conclusions:We conclude that the traditional Chinese medicine methods are effective in treating patient with cervical spondylosis and it's pain related symptoms due to the dynamic nature of treatment methods like acupuncture and moxibustion nd its flexibility for the treatment with no side effects,relieving the pain and restoring the balance of the body.There is a growing scientific consensus that acupuncture is one of the effective treatment modality for the treatment of cervical spondylosis.