ORIGINAL PAPER Informatics framework of traditional Sino-Japanese medicine (Kampo) unveiled by factor analysis

The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Kampo, an empirically validated system of traditional Sino-Japanese medicine, aims to treat patients holistically. This is in contrast to modern medicine, which focuses in principle on treating the affected parts of the body of the patient. Kampo medicines formulated as combinations of crude drugs are prescribed based on a Kampo-specific diagnosis called Sho (in Japanese), defined as the holistic condition of each patient. Therefore, the medication system is very complex and is not well understood from a modern scientific perspective. Here, we show the informatics framework of Kampo medication by multivariate factor analysis of the elements constituting Kampo medication. First, the variation of Kampo formulas projected by principal component analysis (PCA) indicate