Why is humoral medicine so popular?
The hot/cold system is perhaps the most widely known medical belief system in the world. I propose that the wide acceptance of hot/cold ideas is due to the fact that they provide a particularly simple, economic coding for common human experience, such as hypothermia, heatstroke, and fevers. Coding of foods as heating or cooling can be understood in terms of a system of sensory cues that make the foods appear hot or cold. This paper deals primarily with data from Chinese culture.
Anderson
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Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside 92521.
D003080:Cold Temperature; D004035:Diet Therapy; D004194:Disease / Q000209:etiology; D005502:Food; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional