Hamburg (dpa) - A growing number of German medical doctors are turning to Chinese medicine which places emphasis on the holistic approach of combining body, mind and spirit in treatment of illness.

About 40,000 doctors and 5,000 health practioners in the country now practice Chinese medicine, according to the head of the German Acupuncture school in Duesseldorf, Gabriel Stux.

A standardised training programme in Chinese medicine has meanwhile been established in the country as an additional training course for doctors and health practitioners.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a complicated system that includes many facets such as nutrition, the body arts of Qi Gong and Tai Chi, acupuncture, herbal medicine, pulse and tongue diagnosis.

Doctors emphasize that Chinese medicine offers no cure-all but the different approach is finding growing acceptance among patients.

In China TCMis tought at universities as a separate course alongside Western medicine. The system, based on observation and experience going back more than 2,000 years, has been recorded in thousands of books.

"There is no separation," says doctor Christine Bodenschatz-Li "everything is seen from the perspective of yin and yang, each aspect opposing the other and one aspect bringing forth the other".

In the diagnosis doctors look at body posture, smell, the pulse and the tongue. Illness, according to Chinese medicine, comes when there is an imbalance in the body.

Balance is restored using various methods in order to bring life`s energy back into flow. It could be acupuncture or herbal medicine using plant, animal and mineral substances.

"Each treatment is arranged individually including herbs, nutritional advice, acupuncture and guidance on lifestyle," says Bodenschatz-Li who runs the Hamburg centre on Chinese medicine.

The herbs have several hundred basic formulas with thousands of classical variations. These have to be adjusted individually based on the time of the year, age, sex and the phase of the healing process.

"The method has been tried and tested for the past 1,000 to 2,000 years and is therefore very effective," says Bodenschatz-Li.

Most health insurance schemes are still very cautious in covering Chinese medicine, says Barbara Marnach, press spokeswoman of one of Germany`s largest public health insurance companies AOK.

Patients generally have to pay out of their own pocket herbal therapy or nutritional consultancy. But a change in thinking is underway.

Public health insurance is supporting one of the world's largest acupuncture studies, "gerac", that began in 2001. Doctors practising Western medicine are working alongside acupuncture physicians and the health insurance companies in testing the effectiveness of acupuncture. It involves the treatment with acupuncture of some half a million people with chronic back pain and headache.

By the middle of next year the results of the 7.5 million euro study will be presented. The first indications are positive. During the first phase of the project 90 per cent of patients said they felt better than prior to the treatment. No negative side-effects were registered.

From Healthy.net