Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What you will be able to do

Define the Three Treasures (Jing, Qi, Shen) as three layers of system vitality — stored substrate, circulating energy, and reflective awareness — and explain what each describes that Western medical vocabulary does not.
Apply the Yin-Yang framework as a tool for describing dynamic balance (not static opposition) — identifying complementary aspects of any phenomenon and recognizing when the balance has shifted.
Describe the Zang-Fu organ-function systems as functional relationships rather than anatomical organs, and explain why the TCM “liver” is not the biomedical liver.
Explain what meridians describe — channels of functional connection linking interior organs to the surface and to each other — without reducing them to anatomical structures or dismissing them as metaphor.
Use TCM vocabulary diagnostically: given a description of a person’s condition (energy, mood, digestion, sleep, pain patterns), identify which TCM categories are relevant and what pattern they suggest.
Articulate why TCM categories are diagnostic rather than ontological — they describe how a situation presents, not what the world is made of — and why forcing correspondence with Western biomedical categories distorts both systems.

Prerequisites

No formal prerequisites. The reference documents are self-contained.
Familiarity with basic anatomy (particularly the digestive and nervous systems) is helpful for understanding how TCM categories relate to — without reducing to — biomedical structures.

This skill covers using TCM vocabulary as a diagnostic and descriptive framework. It does not cover: