*Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy

103.*Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy

Nominating Unit: City of Shenzhen

Pingle Family Guo’s Bone Setting Therapeutics, originated in Pingle county, Luoyang City, Henan Province, was first established by Guo Xiangtan in 1st year of Jiaqing(1796) and handed down by five generations up till the beginning of this century. Shortly after its establishment, the therapeutics’ fame was spread far and wide for its exquisite leech craft. It was said that someone in the Guo Family was summoned to the Qing Palace to knit the bones and rewarded some title of nobility. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, leaders of the country asked many times for bone treatment. The fifth successor Guo Chunyuan (1923—2005) passed on his therapeutics in Henan and Shenzhen and cultivated large numbers of disciples and students in almost all the large and medium-sized cities who later became the cadres of bone injuries in China’s main academies of traditional Chinese medicine and hospitals of traditional Chinese medicine. And thus this therapeutics has then been spread widely. As an important branch, Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy in Shenzhen is mainly located in Luohu, Futain and Nanshan District.

From the perspective of principles of medical science, Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy emphasizes dialectic in the whole, technique of taxis, fastening with plywood, medicine for internal and external use, equal importance on muscle and bone, move and rest and functional exercises. In leech craft, it combines the traditional eight methods of touch, join, hold, lift, push, massage, press and rubbing as well as the ancestral eight methods of dialectic, chop, foam press, attach, traction and counter-traction, bricking, supporting and pushing. They are especially good at massage with the palms, diagnoses as well as fracture and dislocation treatment with the hands, and even treating the aged shoulder and coax joint dislocation which is relatively difficult. The technique was exquisite and various, including eight checking methods of touch, press, jostle, rapping, twisting, stretching and bending as well as Erfu, eight diaplasis methods, four ways and twelve principles of massage as well as restoring and treating injured soft tissues, five methods of fixing the fractured bones and seven methods of functional exercises to therapy the waist and the back. Besides, the therapists use 13 pure Chinese drugs pharmaceutics like detumescence mixture by operating the ancestral formula, assisted by some medicine for internal and external use, making the therapy very effective.(https://www.daowen.com)

Not only did Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy form its unique and complete diagnoses system, Guo Chunyuan, a family member, also integrated the rich experience of several generations and shaped them into a perfect theory in his two books: Pingle Guo Shi Zheng Traditional Methods and Shi Yi Zheng Gu Cong Xin. And finally, their diagnoses and treatment methods became the main stream school of bone setting in Chinese medicine. Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy was selected into the list of the second batch of state-level intangible cultural heritage in 2008.

Because of various reasons, Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy has been faced with some problems like being marginalized in the hospitals, its IPR being inappropriately protected, no successor as lack of policies and measures to stimulate the passing-on and so on. If these problems were not solved or given appropriate attention, Pingle Kwok Bonesetting Medical Therapy would scarcely avoid the danger of disappearance.