[Integrative medical study on the essence of Pi-Wei syndrome and nutritional support therapy]

Great achievements have been made in the development of integrative medicine (IM). Some hot issues of IM are discussed in this article. The essence of syndrome is the key of syndrome differentiation and combination of disease identification and syndrome typing, and it is the core factor for assimilating Western medicine (WM) and Chinese medicine (CM). Take Pi deficiency syndrome (PDS) as an example. PDS is a condition featured as dysfunction and disorder of absorbance, digestion, movement, nutrition and metabolism in the digestive system. The formation laws and material bases of PDS should be explored by taking the viewpoint of systems biology as the starting point and taking confirmed syndrome types of various diseases as the breakthrough point in the future. Nutritional support therapy is a great advance in the medicine field in the 20th century. It can significantly improve clinical outcomes of patients suffering from various kinds of diseases. There are some similarities between Pi-Wei theory and the treatment principle of regulating Pi and Wei in CM and nutritional support therapy in modern medicine. The organic combination of them will be worthy of further research. In the IM field, the consensuses of diagnosing and treating more than 10 kinds of digestive diseases have been reached. But it is necessary to elevate the organic combination of WM and CM. These medical guidelines should be widely used and tested in clinical practice to get more evidence, thus continually completing established medical guidelines.