Branches
Traditional Thai medicine (used as umbrella term for all medicine of Thailand) consists of five primary branches:
- Internal Medicine - Primarily the use of herbs and diet to promote health
- External Medicine - All therapies applied to the external body including but not limited to:
- Bone setting (indigenous chiropractics)
- Thai cupping
- Thai scraping (a practice similar to Chinese Gua Sha)
- Thai massage techniques including compression, Thai acupressure, beating, passive stretching and focus on sen channels (pathways of movement in the body such as tendons, ligaments, nerves and circulatory vessels)
- External application of herbs through balms, liniments, compresses and poultices
- Spirit Medicine - Use of amulets, incantations, sak yan tattooing and shamanistic involvement with spirits for the purpose of healing
- Divination - Use of vedic astrology, numerology, palmistry and geomancy to determine health predisposition and remedial measures
- Buddhism - seen as the mental health branch of Thai medicine.
Read more about this topic: Traditional Thai Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word branches:
“It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
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““I couldn’t afford to learn it,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)