TCM Patterns- Understanding the THEORY

I’m not sure what exactly you’re asking here. First of all depression is almost never just a liver pattern and in fact there are types of depression that have nothing to do at all with the liver system in TCM. The theory of Chinese medicine have evolved over centuries of hands on clinical experience and the validation is that the application of said theory has measurable clinical results.

In TCM theory there is essentially no such concept as a disease as a stand-alone affectation the way Western medicine classifies them. There are patterns of disturbances in the balance of yin/yang qi and blood across the various organ systems. The patterns themselves may manifest as different symptoms, and across different people the exact same symptoms could be caused by different underlying pattern(s). Also not all the possible symptoms from a particular pattern necessarily manifest, and in general most people present with some overlap of multiple patterns. Sorry if that sounds complicated but it sort of is.

Diagnosis starts with using all aspects of Chinese Medicine to determine what the needs of the individual patient are. The tools are primarily those listed under the “Examinations and Diagnosis” section on our TCM theory page - tongue, pulse, etc.

The tricky part, which simply takes clinical experience to understand, is that many patients have layered diagnoses. Treatment then requires either figuring out which one is deeper - the true “root” pattern and/or treating aspects of the layered diagnoses first and then when that is clear work on the “root”.