Two Maintenance Strategies for the Human Electrochemical System: The Physical Basis of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Concepts in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

The human body is a body-wide electrochemical system: cell membranes serve as capacitive units, mitochondria as energy conversion engines, autonomic nerves as regulatory wiring, and the brain as the control center with the densest low-resistance pathways carved by the history of charge flow. The fundamental driving force sustaining the operation of this system is the continuously input electrochemical potential gradient—termed herein "Electrochemical Lift" [1]. On this physical foundation, all medical interventions are essentially maintenance operations performed on this system. This paper identifies two parallel maintenance strategies in human medical practice: the Western medical model centered on "part replacement" and "acute intervention," and the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) model centered on "system maintenance" and "steady-state regulation." These two strategies are not opposed to each other; rather, they are two engineering approaches applied to the same electrochemical infrastructure, corresponding respectively to different stages of system failure—acute collapse and chronic drift. This paper further demonstrates that the core concepts of TCM—pulse diagnosis, Qi, meridians, Yin-Yang, Heart governing Shen Ming, preventive treatment of disease, and guiding drugs—can all be precisely translated into this physical language: pulse diagnosis is real-time monitoring of the dissipation center's output state, i.e., system state sensing; Qi is Electrochemical Lift itself, i.e., system voltage; meridians are low-resistance pathway networks, i.e., current distribution topology; Yin-Yang balance is the Electrochemical Counter-Neutralization Steady State, i.e., system steady state; Heart governing Shen Ming is the control function of dense nodes, i.e., the control center; preventive treatment of disease is source-level maintenance during low-load window periods; and guiding drugs are selective conductance agents, i.e., targeted impedance modulation. For each of the above physical definitions, this paper provides testable experimental predictions and explicit falsification conditions. This framework elevates medicine from an "empirical craft" to "system maintenance engineering," laying a verifiable physical foundation for the unification of Chinese and Western medicine.