Hi Will,
Thanks for sharing this forum over the past 7 years!

I have a question for all of you out there studying pulses about a possible research question.  There is always the individual practitioner's interpretation of pulse; however, there should be some sense of inter-rater reliability. I know this is one of the reasons Will, as well as Dr. Shen and Hammer's other students, have been teaching pulse taking, so that discussions based on pulses can be understood by more than one or two individuals.

Would it be possible then to demonstrate to the academic world, namely the medical field, how pulse taking is a reliable method of diagnosis?  My proposal is to begin with a small study with 5-7 practitoners that all have similar amounts of training and pulse taking backgrounds, interview patients only by taking their pulses and doing a basic TCM diagnosis.  If these individual practitioners are able to give very similar to same diagnoses without the other interview skills used for diagnosis, there would be a small but useful demonstration of how acupuncture works from the diagnosis to the treatment.  This is of course useful for allowing academia to say, yes, this is a reliable method of diagnosis and even though we don't know how acupuncture works itself, it demonstrates the individualized diagnoses that is used in treatment, even if the individuals all have the same allopathic diagnosis.

Have there been any demonstrations of such? and where could I find information on this?  My interest in this is from a patient who was curious as to what my interpretation of his pulses were in comparison to another practitioner's and how reliable the diagnostic procedures were for TCM.  I know there are many nuances with pulse diagnosis, but there are also nuances for interpreting a CAT scan or MRI and the better the practitioner or the more reliable the diagnositic technique, the more solid of a diagnosis can be made. 

Thanks for your input!
Ingrid Park


WMorris116@... wrote:

Dear All -

We have approximately 688 members from all over the world. The list has grown as we aproach our 7th anniversary on May15.

Those of you who are new will find in the archives among the 3,332 messages some important discussions and pearls. Some of them from pulse significant diagnosis teachers who have passed away including Rory Kerr and James Ramholz. Also, be sure to check the files section. There are some great pulse diagnosis resources. For example Robert Baptist has a chart that provides an overview of neoclassical methods.

Will

 

William R. Morris, DAOM, MSEd, LAc
President Emeritus, AAAOM
2700 Anderson Ln 204
Austin, TX 78757
512-454-1188

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