Clinical female nurses' five-tone distribution and analysis of traditional Chinese medicine constitution

Abstract

Objective To explore the five-tone distribution of clinical female nurses and the constitution of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) . Methods Totally 300 clinical female nurses from a Class Ⅲ Grade A hospital were selected. Zhiji Wenyin identification evaluator (KY3H) was used to identify their five tones, and the TCM Constitution Classification and Identification Scale developed by China Association of Chinese Medicine was used to identify their TCM constitution. The five-tone distribution and TCM constitution were compared between the nurses with different ages, job categories and shifts. Results The tones of Jue, Zhi and Yu accounted for 39%, 34% and 21.4% respectively of the five-tone distribution in the 300 clinical female nurses. Divided by age, the tone of Yu was more often found in the younger group, while the tone of Jue had a larger share in the older group (χ2=13.014, 4.719; P<0.05) . The tones of Yu and Jue were more often found in the night shift group than in the day shift group (χ2=5.902, 3.985; P<0.05) . As for the TCM constitution, the mildly, yang-insufficiency, qi-stagnation and damp-heat constitutions accounted for 31.33%, 21.67%, 11.67% and 11.00%, respectively. The nurses in the internal medicine group showed a higher proportion of qi-stagnation and blood-stasis constitutions than the nurses in the surgery group (χ2=6.478, 5.902; P<0.05) . The nurses in the day shift group showed a higher proportion of mildly constitution than the nurses in the night shift group, while the nurses in the night shift group showed a higher proportion of qi-insufficiency constitution than the nurses in the day shift group (χ2=6.210, 5.270; P<0.05) . The tone of Zhi had the largest share in the nurses with the qi-insufficiency constitution (P=0.002) , while the nurses with the qi-stagnation constitution had the least share among the nurses with the tone of Yu (P=0.045) . Conclusions The characteristics of five-tone distribution and TCM constitution of clinical female nurses may be affected by their age and job category. Key words: Nurses; Five tones correlated with five zang viscera; Constitution identification; The Canon of Internal Medicine