Siddha Based Disease Diagnosis System

Medical diagnosis describes the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms. It is often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context. Diagnosis is often challenging, because many signs and symptoms are seemed to be nonspecific. There are a numerous methods or techniques that can be used in diagnosing diseases, including differential diagnosis or adapting medical algorithms. In reality, a diagnostic procedure may involve multiple methods.

The process of wrong diagnosis are the dominant cause for medical malpractice payments, accounting for 35% of total payments in a study of 25 years of data and 350,000 claims. Developing a common tool for diagnosing almost all kinds of diseases is a tedious task for every biomedical engineering scholar or researcher. In south India, Pulse diagnosis is a tool according to Siddha which is considered as one of the world’s oldest medical systems. It was designed and practiced widely not only in India, but also in other parts of the world like China, Egypt, and Greece. The pulse diagnosis has been mentioned in the papyrus of ancient Egyptian medicine in detail.

In that physicians in the West use the pulse to determine the heart rate, their Siddha counterparts observes the patterns of vibration that imitate the metabolic processes going on in the body at that specific time. Corresponding to each of the three doshas, they locate three different pulses in single radial artery on each wrist. The index finger senses the vata pulse; the middle finger, the pitta pulse; and the ring finger, senses the kapha pulse.

The adept practitioner can also locate other pulses which are combinations of the main three pulses as well as subdivisions of those pulses. The well-trained pulse-taker can detect as many as 32 different pulse qualities. The rhythm and flow of vibrating movement of these distinct pulses tells the examiner what is the condition of other systems beyond those related to the cardiovascular system.

The experienced clinician can read, based on the pulses, the strength and vitality of each internal organ, and even that is reputed to be able to diagnose diseases like asthma and diabetes. Pulse diagnosis is explained scientifically by its condition of each dosha having different tactile vibratory qualities in the radial artery (or, the vibrations in the wrist artery have a different feel to each finger). It is the presence and location of these vibratory qualities (with such names as the snake pulse, the frog pulse, or the swan pulse) that alerts the physician to determine the nature of the imbalance that is responsible for the provider’s condition.