Why does my Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner ask me so many personal questions?

In order to ensure that your diagnosis is accurate,  your TCM practitioner may ask you a wide variety of rather personal questions.  They will likely ask you the frequency of your bowel movements and urination, how many hours you sleep at night, what time you go to sleep, how often you have sex, what temperature of water you prefer to drink, the colour of your menstrual blood, among other things.  It could be that you may not know the answer to some of these questions, and so by asking you become aware that you must now may attention to these details.  All of these details, along with pulse and tongue diagnosis, allow the practitioner to determine the root of your condition.  Just knowing your most obvious or annoying symptoms may not be enough information to yield a correct diagnosis and so that is why all of these questions are asked.

The beauty of TCM is that you may discover that the five symptoms you thought were five separate problems all turn out to be only one pattern in TCM.   For example, the top of your shoulders, hips, and outer ankles may be sore all the time, you often get headaches on the side of your head and you get frustrated easily.   Your TCM practitioner would be able to recognize that all of these symptoms indicate an underlying problem with Gallbladder function because the Gallbladder meridian runs across the top of the shoulders, hips and and outer ankles, and the side of the head.  Your TCM practitioner will treat this pattern accordingly. 

As another example, a patient may complain of dry eyes, irritability, bitter taste in the mouth, menstrual cramps, heartburn, and headache and these symtoms all indicate the pattern of Liver Fire.  By finding the root of the all of the symptoms, they can all be treated at once.  This means faster relief and it eliminates the need to treat each symptoms individually sometimes with a different Western medication for each one.