"Classical Chinese medicine" refers to the cumulative practices and abstract doctrines passed down by a small literate minority in China beginning in the first century B.C.E. As in any traditional society, this elite knowledge has made up only a small part of China's health care practices, which include self-therapy, family therapy, and ritual and religious curing. Since 1949, as these elements have changed and their balance has shifted, state-regulated medical practice has come gradually to be divided between biomedicine and a greatly modernized form of the classical art generally called traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM, and hybrids of the two.
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