Diagnostic-Treatment Standards

CORE DEFINITION

A medical work of the Ming dynasty that systematically records the correspondence between symptom patterns, underlying causes, and treatment methods, functioning as a standardized reference for clinical decisions. The core proposition is that mapping symptoms to causes to treatments in a fixed reference reduces variation between practitioners and makes clinical knowledge transmissible. The key qualification is that the reference is a default rather than a rule: individual variation must be accommodated within the pathway, and the standard itself must be revised as new evidence appears. The modern analogue is the clinical pathway.