Medicine in China

Physicians largely depended on opposition therapy, but could modulate it in sophisticated ways. Once the practitioner knew the character of the disorder, he chose therapies to oppose and overcome the imbalance by strengthening the body's functions or attacking the pathogenic agent. The physician's tools included modifications of diet and exercise, massage and manipulation, and a great variety of drugs (over eighteen hundred, mineral and animal as well as botanical, in the great Bencao gangmu [1596; Systematic materia medica ]), as well as acupuncture (inserting needles at certain locations on the circulation pathways to adjust the movement of qi) and moxibustion (burning cones of leaf pulp to stimulate these locations more intensely).