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Chinese medical disease cause and disease mechanism
The disease name Tourette's syndrome does not exist in the traditional Chinese medical literature. However, this does not mean that Chinese medicine does not treat Tourette's. Rather, it is an example of how Chinese medicine classifies and describes diseases differently from Western medicine. During the approximate 2000 year long development of Chinese medicine, symptoms of diseases were observed closely and classified into traditional disease categories. In the case of Tourette's, because the main symptom is shaking and convulsive behaviour of different body parts, it was classified as tetany disease (jing bing). Tetany in Chinese medicine again does not equate to the Western medical illness of tetanus. Tetany is a technical term in Chinese medicine and is defined in Feng and Wiseman's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine as "severe spasm such as rigidity in the neck, clenched jaw, convulsions of the limbs, and arched-back rigidity." (10) The listed causes of repletion pattern tetany are wind, cold, dampness, phlegm, or fire congesting the channels. Causes for vacuity pattern tetany are excessive sweating, loss of blood, and constitutional vacuity causing qi vacuity, shortage of blood, and insufficiency of fluids. Furthermore, Chinese medicine distinguishes between hard tetany and soft tetany, also called yang and yin tetany, respectively. The former is characterised by the absence of sweating and a tight and bowstring (wiry/xian) pulse. The latter is characterised by sweating and a slow and sunken pulse.

In children, tetany is often referred to as 'fright wind' or 'child fright wind'. In infants, this is also called 'infantile convulsions'. Although fright wind describes a disease in which infants or young children suffer from convulsions and loss of consciousness (a symptom not generally part of Tourette's syndrome), the disease causes and mechanisms of these traditional diseases can be closely linked to Tourette's via their common disease factor wind. Hence, disease mechanism and treatment ideas developed about infantile convulsions or fright wind are also applicable in the diagnosis and treatment of Tourette's syndrome.