As one of the series of National Planned University Textbooks for International Traditional Chinese Medicine Education organized by Higher Education Press, Diagnostics of Traditional Chinese Medicine is compiled to adapt to the development of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the 21st century and meet the needs of international TCM education.
       
Diagnostics of Traditional Chinese Medicine is a discipline on the essential theory and fundamental knowledge as well as skills in diagnosing diseases and differentiating syndromes. It is a major course among curricula of TCM and often considered as a link between the essential TCM theory and clinical subspecialties.
       
Based on the teaching scheme for domestic TCM undergraduate education, this book covers the examination outline for professional TCM practitioners (acupuncturists) both at home and abroad and closely relates to the actual requirement of practicing medicine in overseas countries. This book includes three major parts: diagnostic methods, syndrome differentiation and medical cases. With an emphasis on the four diagnostic methods, namely, inspection, auscultation & olfaction, inquiry and pulse-taking & palpation, this book utilizes figures and tables in the part of diagnostic methods to illustrate the principle and clinical meaning of common clinical techniques; with an emphasis on differentiation of disease nature and location, this book made simple but profound analysis on syndrome patterns in the part of syndrome differentiation to clarify the way of thinking on TCM syndrome differentiation; this book also aims at training the students' ability to write standard medical cases in the part of diagnosis and medical cases. In addition, several questions are attached to each chapter for the students to review what they have learned.
      
This book is well-organized with precise elaborations and smooth but concise language. The standardized medical terms and metric units are used in both Chinese and English in this book. The latest version of Standardization of Traditional Chinese Medicine Terms and English Translation of Common Terms in Traditional Chinese Medicine issued by the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine are taken as the standard for the TCM terms and phrases in this book. In addition, unlike the conventional format and rigid accumulation of words, 20%-30% of the contents in this book are figures and tables, which make the contents more readable, straight and accurate.
     
This book is intended primarily for the overseas students who are learning TCM (including the students of degree education and students of short term training programs), the students in China of bilingual education and those who intend to do international exchange in the field of TCM.