I agree that for many cases the western way doesn’t work. Let’s not forget that the Chinese culture has a past of thousands of years and, thus, a deep understanding of nature’s mechanisms.

But, although still a youth, it’s pretty mature in thought since it progressively realizes the wisdom of its older counterpart. Fortunately, contemporary ‘western’ medicine is continuously adopting ‘eastern’ approaches for treatment, introducing substances found in herbs into pharmaceutical products.

It’s also moving towards a systemic overview. (Systems Biology is experiencing a ‘renaissance’ era -it’s a very fashionable research topic the last 5 years- making use of the huge amount of information generated by Bioinformatics) So, I guess that a modern ‘western’ doctor would make the connection between the cataract and the heart pulses (too much information for one eye => headache => ‘mood’ change => heart pulse fluctuations).

A weak point of ‘eastern’ medicine is that in many cases the cause of the problem is not coming from Nature. We could say that we create our own problems. When composing chemical substances that will make us smell better (perfumes) we cannot easily predict the overall side effects on our organism by their use. Moreover Nature cannot ‘recognize’ these newly synthesized substances, so it doesn’t have the mechanisms to deal with them.
(another good example of West’s turn to the East is another modern trend calles ‘ecotoxicogenomics’, which deals with the effects of the human made chemicals on the environment and the organizms’ genomes -I was shocked when I learned that a hospital’s toxic wastes released in the sea caused sex change in some fish populations by mutating a gene!…-)