Dysentery

A disease characterized by abdominal pain, tenesmus, and stool containing pus and blood (described as mucoid and bloody stool in Western medicine). Dysentery usually occurs in hot weather and arises when gastrointestinal vacuity and eating raw, cold, or unclean food allow damp-heat or other evils to brew in the intestines. It takes the form of vacuity or repletion. Depending on the cause, distinction is made between summerheat dysentery, damp-heat dysentery, cold dysentery, and heat dysentery. Depending on the nature of the stool, distinction is made between red dysentery (blood in the stool), white dysentery (pus in the stool), and red and white dysentery (stool containing pus and blood). Depending on the condition of the patient and stage of the disease, distinction is made between epidemic dysentery; food-denying dysentery, intermittent dysentery, enduring dysentery, and vacuity dysentery.

Medicinal therapy: Repletion patterns are treated by clearing heat and transforming dampness, cooling the blood and resolving toxin, and dispersing accumulation and abducting stagnation. Vacuity patterns are treated by supplementing the center and boosting qì and promoting astriction and stemming desertion.

Etymology

Chin 痢 lì is composed of 利 lì, uninhibited, with the illness signifier 疒 chuáng. In earlier texts, it was used in the less specific sense of diarrhea (uninhibited movement of the bowels). Eng from Gk. dys-, bad, abnormal + enter(on,) intestine + ia, noun suffix.