Treatment Of Infertility With Chinese Medicine

CHURCHILL LIVINGSTONE An imprint of Elsevier Limited © 2004, Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. is a registered trademark of Elsevier Limited The right of Jane Lyttleton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without either the prior permission of the publishers (Permissions Manager, Harcourt Health Sciences, Robert Stevenson House, 1–3 Baxter’s Place, Leith Walk, Edinburgh EH1 3AF), or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. First published 2004 ISBN 0443 06640X British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed in The Publisher's policy is to use paper manufactured from sustainable forests | Foreword The practice of Chinese medicine is maturing in the West. In the quarter century since it began to be known outside of the communities of overseas Chinese, we have watched it move into mainstream Western culture, seen the establishment of high-level education in Chinese medical studies at a number of unversities around the world, and welcomed an increasing recognition of both its limitations and its benefits. This book marks the beginning of a new phase: the publication of the fruits of the long-term personal experience in clinic, by non-Chinese physicians specialising in one of the various departments of Chinese medicine. Gynaecology is certainly an appropriate beginning, for both its relevance and effectiveness, but we should soon be seeing books recounting the personalised techniques, tools and theories developed over decades of use in Western settings by workers in other departments of Chinese medicine, such as dermatology, paeadiatrics, orthopaedics, and ophthalmology. This, of course, is only a new thing for us in the West. The tradition within China extends back well over 700 years, following the establishment of distinct specialties in separate departments of Chinese medicine by the imperial court of the Song dynasty. Since that time, texts from the brushes of a multitude of specialists with 30–50 years of experience in a given department have done much to inform, improve and even revolutionise the practice of their time and peop