초록
Objective : The aim of this study was to survey the present utilization of pattern identification(PI) in the clinical field among Korean Medicine Doctors. Method : This survey was conducted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 2014 by face-to-face interview using structured questionnaire. The subjects were 400 korean medicine doctors who worked in hospitals or clinics. The questionnaire consisted of two sections - a demographics section(i.e., sex, age, clinical experience, place of work, residence and so on) and the main research section(i.e., the PI utilization rate, the utilization of PI systems, the utilization of PI in the clinical domain and in the treatment domain, the correlation between utilization PI and so on). Results : This study revealed that subjects used the PI to 66.7% of their patients on average. The utilization rate of PI in patients was significantly higher for female physicians than for male physicians, for physicians worked in clinics than for physicians who worked in hospitals and for physicians with more than 10 years clinical experience than for physicians with less than 10 years clinical experience. In the utilization of PI systems, Visceral PI was most as 92.0%. There were significant difference on the PI utilization rate according to utilization of Meridian and Collateral PI, Triple Energizer PI, Defense, Qi, Nutrient and Blood PI, Six-Meridian PI and Six Excesses PI. As a result of analysing the PI utilization rate by clinical domain and in the treatment domain, the Treatment and the Drug Treatment showed the highest values. Among utilized PI systems, the correlation coefficients between Defense, Qi, Nutrient and Blood PI and Triple Energizer PI showed the highest value, but the correlation coefficients between Sasang Constitutional Medicine with the each PI showed substantially lower value. Conclusion : The results of this study demonstrate that usage of PI was higher than usage of U code(in KCD) usage in clinical field. we suggested that additional studies on using PI and developing more appropriate standardized tool should be conducted to widen scope of PI's utilization.