Traditional Chinese medicine and rehabilitation

1. Where it sits in the system

Traditional Chinese medicine in China is not an alternative sector outside the health system. It is inside it: there are TCM hospitals graded on the same scale as general hospitals, TCM departments inside general hospitals, and practitioners who hold a medical licence. Integrated wards, where TCM and conventional treatment run alongside each other, are common in rehabilitation.

What this means practically is that the same verification applies here as anywhere else, grade, filing, department, and the individual practitioner’s registration. How to read a Chinese hospital and how to read a doctor’s credentials both apply unchanged.

2. What a course looks like

This is the part that most affects your planning, and it is routinely underestimated by people arranging a trip.

• Courses are measured in weeks. A meaningful course is commonly two to four weeks or longer, not a handful of appointments.
• Attendance is frequent. Daily or near-daily in many programmes, which means staying close to the institution rather than travelling in.
• Sessions are short but fixed. Each is typically well under an hour, but at a scheduled time, which constrains what else a day can hold.
• An assessment opens it. What is prescribed follows from that assessment, so the plan, and therefore the duration and the cost, is not fully known until you have been seen.
• Reassessment is built in. Ask when the plan is reviewed and what changes at that point.

A course of acupuncture, manual therapy, moxibustion or an herbal prescription may be given alone or in combination. We can translate the plan and interpret at sessions so that the instructions are understood correctly, particularly the ones about what to do between sessions, which are easy to lose across a language gap.

3. Herbal medicine is medicine

Prescribed herbal preparations are pharmaceuticals in the way that matters: they have doses, interactions, contraindications and regulatory status.

Two consequences:

• Tell the prescribing practitioner everything you take at home, with generic names, and have it translated properly. Interaction is a real question, not a formality.
• Carrying preparations home is subject to your own country’s import rules, which differ substantially and which we are not in a position to advise on. Ask your own customs authority before you assume.

And our own hard limit, which does not move: we do not buy, collect, carry, forward or handle any medicine, herbal or otherwise, in any circumstance.

4. What we will not say about it

We make no claim that any TCM treatment will improve any condition, and we publish no figures suggesting it does. This is not a coded opinion about the field, it is the same rule we apply to every treatment on this site, including the most conventional. Efficacy claims require primary published evidence, a named population, a stated indication and a clear statement that they do not predict outcomes for any individual. Where we cannot meet that standard, we describe the process and stop.

Whether TCM is appropriate for you is a question for a qualified clinician who has reviewed your records, and it is worth asking your own doctor at home as well as the practitioner here.

5. What drives the cost

Cost in this area follows attendance rather than procedure: how many sessions, over how many weeks, plus any prescribed preparations, plus accommodation for the duration. The last item is frequently the largest, and it is accommodation rather than treatment, booked and paid for by you, directly. The distinction is set out on recuperation after treatment.