China Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Training and Education Overview
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Chinese medicine reached a new level of organized development in the 20th century, when the government of the People's Republic of China built a formal system to train qualified practitioners of national medicine. That system combined six-year institutes, shorter medical schools, individual apprenticeship, advanced-training seminars, and a dedicated research institute — a structure designed to preserve traditional knowledge while testing it against modern science.
How are doctors of Chinese medicine trained in China?
Doctors of Chinese medicine in China are trained through a tiered network of institutes, schools, apprenticeships, and refresher courses, each pitched at a different level of prior education. The full pathway runs from six-year university-level institutes down to short correspondence courses, so that practitioners at every stage — from school leavers to long-practicing folk physicians — have a route to qualify or upgrade their skills.
What do the institutes of Chinese medicine teach?
Four institutes of Chinese medicine operate in the country with a six-year course of study, open to students who have completed a full secondary education. These institutes train doctors of national medicine of the highest qualification, functioning largely as "cadres for cadres" — that is, producing the senior practitioners and teachers who will themselves train others.
Alongside the institutes sit Chinese medicine schools with a shorter four-to-five-year course. These schools are designed for people with incomplete secondary education and for existing health-care practitioners, and they train mid-level specialists. The training of new personnel is also encouraged through individual apprenticeship, the traditional master-to-student route that long predates the modern system.
Policy toward the large body of already-practicing folk doctors is deliberately flexible. The aim is twofold: to retrain these practitioners in correct treatment methods, and, through special schools and evening schools, to raise their qualifications and deepen their grasp of both the practice and the theory of medicine.
What are the special medical schools?
Twenty-one special medical schools have been established in the republic, according to the figures cited in the book by Jing Xin-chung. These schools teach disciplines drawn from modern science — anatomy, physiology, diagnostics, infectious diseases, and similar subjects — in order to broaden practicing doctors' qualifications and ground them in contemporary medical knowledge. Training in them lasts from eight months to one and a half years.
Many short-term courses, including correspondence courses, supplement the special schools. The Institute of Traditional Medicine in Beijing supervises the correspondence courses: its staff prepare the texts of lectures and send them out to students in the field, extending advanced training to practitioners far from the major cities.
How do the advanced-training seminars for doctors work?
Seminars for extramural physicians at county hospitals became a widespread form of advanced training, well suited to rural practitioners. In Tun County, for example, a group of traditional-medicine physicians met twice a week at an outpatient clinic. At the first session each week, the clinic doctor explained the material of the next lecture and answered the participants' questions.
At the second weekly session, the trainees themselves discussed the topic in a seminar-style interview. This method proved the most accessible and popular form of training, because most of these doctors also worked in agriculture alongside their medical duties — the seminar format let them study without stepping away from their daily work.
How are Chinese medicine researchers trained?
China set up dedicated research-training courses at its Institutes of Advanced Training, organized into three specialized groups under the Ministry of Health:
- The first group trains the teaching staff for the advanced-training courses aimed at people's physicians.
- The second group trains specialists in Chinese medicine treatment methods.
- The third group specializes in the study of medicinal preparations, mainly of plant origin.
Chinese medicine doctors with a general secondary education and some practical experience are admitted to these courses, which last five years. The structure deliberately produces not just practitioners but the teachers and pharmacological researchers who sustain the wider system.
What is the Medical Research Institute?
The Medical Research Institute was established in December 1955 as the central body for studying and systematizing the heritage of Chinese national medicine. Its purpose is to organize that heritage, enrich modern medicine with it, and improve public health by applying scientific methods to traditional practice — a tangible sign of the serious attention the People's Government gave to domestic medicine.
The Institute is built around three laboratories, plus a clinic and teaching courses:
- Surgery and Therapeutics,
- zhenqiu therapy (zhen means acupuncture or acupressure; qiu means cauterization),
- Chinese medicines.
How is the Surgery and Therapy Laboratory organized?
The Surgery and Therapy Laboratory is divided into clinical sections covering the main fields of practice:
- internal medicine,
- pediatric,
- women's,
- ophthalmology,
- general surgery,
- bone.
What does the Zhenqiu Therapy Laboratory study?
The Zhenqiu Therapy Laboratory concentrates on the body systems where acupuncture and cauterization show the clearest effects, and is split into sections for:
- circulation,
- digestion,
- respiration,
- diseases of the nervous system.
Together, the Surgery and Therapy Laboratory and the Zhenqiu Therapy Laboratory focus their research on two kinds of illness: common diseases where Chinese medicine has already achieved a noticeable effect, and difficult, poorly researched diseases that resist treatment. In the Institute's clinical department, only methods and remedies of Chinese folk medicine are used — but each case is preceded by careful re-diagnosis and a review of the results obtained when the same disease was first treated by Western methods.
What does the Chinese Medicines Laboratory do?
The Chinese Medicines Laboratory studies the drugs themselves through four specialized offices:
- pharmacognosy,
- pharmacology,
- chemical analysis,
- herbal dilution and dosage.
The main tasks of the Chinese Medicines Laboratory are:
- to study and standardize the norms for common Chinese medicines;
- to explain, by combining the theory of modern science with clinical practice, the pharmacology and efficacy of those medicines;
- to improve the dosage of Chinese medicines;
- to improve the cultivation technique of medicinal plants.
What results has the Institute's clinic achieved?
The Institute's clinic combines modern equipment with many departments, admitting large numbers of patients and carrying out research in the course of ordinary treatment. Its scientific staff are drawn from both worlds — famous doctors of Chinese medicine and leading Western-medicine specialists transferred from across the country — and in the Institute's Chinese medicine courses, Western-trained doctors learn the theory and therapeutic methods of Chinese science.
Over the Institute's first two years of operation, 30,176 patients underwent clinical treatment, according to data reported by the doctor Liu Xin-chu, and many were relieved of serious illnesses. Among the documented results, six patients with optic nerve atrophy were successfully treated in the eye-diseases section, while the bone section achieved good outcomes in bone tuberculosis. A further Chinese-medicine technique for bone injuries — applying massage alone to specific points on the injured limb — also gave good results.
Noticeable effects were recorded across several internal and other conditions treated at the Institute:
- diabetes mellitus,
- inflammation of the liver and gall bladder,
- female diseases, where Chinese medicine proved of great benefit,
- nervous diseases, where zhenqiu therapy gave especially encouraging results.
What did the research on zhenqiu therapy show?
The Zhenqiu Therapy Laboratory extended its tests in recent years to pulmonary tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, and bronchial asthma, achieving satisfactory results. Working with the Beijing Tuberculosis Institute, it formed a group that began treating 195 patients with pulmonary tuberculosis by zhenqiu therapy from 1956 onward. The effectiveness showed especially in the relief of night sweats, insomnia, and loss of appetite.
Considerable work was also done on the underlying theory of zhenqiu therapy. Tests on dogs demonstrated that the therapy affects the peristalsis of the intestines and stomach and the chemical composition of the blood. In the 1960s, research turned to identifying the precise points used in zhenqiu therapy, while the Chinese Medicines Laboratory carried out a series of studies on the pharmacology of several dozen traditional remedies.
How do Western-medicine doctors study Chinese folk medicine?
Western-medicine doctors study Chinese folk medicine because their participation is the most important condition for the discipline's successful modern development. The Institute organized this study so that Chinese national medicine can be inherited by doctors who already hold modern scientific knowledge, ensuring the tradition is carried forward rather than left to fade.
The study of Chinese folk medicine by Western-medicine doctors is carried out in two ways:
- regular specialized training,
- on-the-job training.
Seventy-six Western-medicine doctors attended the regular courses, studying some of the most important classical books of Chinese medicine and undertaking clinical practice in hospitals. After working through Chinese medicine systematically, doctors who had previously doubted it came to regard domestic medicine as an inexhaustible source of folk wisdom, experience, and knowledge, and grew eager to study it more deeply. Those who learned it through clinical work can already apply its methods to treat a range of diseases.
Why is Chinese medicine attracting attention abroad?
Chinese medicine drew growing international interest, with trainees from the USSR, Korea, and Vietnam coming to China specifically to study zhenqiu therapy, alongside others who studied surgery and therapy, the history of Chinese medicine, and its pharmacology. The Institute became both a teaching center and a destination for foreign patients seeking traditional treatment.
Between April 1956 and December 1957, the Institute's laboratories and clinics provided effective care to many foreigners. In the zhenqiu therapy laboratory alone, patients were treated from the USSR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Algeria, Ceylon, Japan, and England.
What are the prospects for Chinese medicine?
The prospects for the development of Chinese medicine are bright, in the assessment of the specialists who built and worked within this system. As they came to see, once Chinese medicine is systematized and generalized with the help of modern science, it stands to make a major contribution to world medical science — a marked change from the conditions Chinese national medicine endured before the establishment of the people's system.
This shift was reflected in the practitioners themselves. Folk physicians without exception aligned with the new system, and the most authoritative among them began revealing the most cherished and valuable ancient recipes and treatment methods — knowledge kept in the strictest secrecy for hundreds of years and across tens of generations. All of this contrasted sharply with the marginal position of Chinese national medicine in earlier times.
Taken together, the broad popular base of the tradition, its proper relationship with modern science, and the steady enrichment of its data point toward a single outcome: the unification and fusion of folk and scientific medicine into one powerful medical system. Such a system, the Institute's leading figures argued, would play an outstanding role not only in China but in the wider world.
