A Systems Biology Approach to Hot and Cold Theory

The use of traditional medicine as an important part of complementary/alternative medicine spread nowadays all around the world. Something that is due to the lack of effectiveness of modern medicine in treating some disease especially chronic disease. Since one of the most important theories beside traditional medicine is the concept of “temperaments” and this is very close to the concept of personalized medicine, which is taken into consideration nowadays. It is important to investigate what really temperament is and also reach a precise meaning and criteria for determining it. For reviewing all the researches that have been done on temperaments till today, the most popular database like PubMed, Scopus, Google scholar, science direct and etc. were searched for keywords Hot and cold, temperaments, hot and cold medicine, hot and cold nature, hot and cold parameters till September 2015. The results show that there are some physiological and metabolic criteria, genes and networks and metabolite that contribute in determining the temperaments not only in body but also in disease, foods and drugs. Despite the presence of all these detailed data the lack of a comprehensive practical criteria for temperament is still obvious, so we try to gather all data to reach that in its best way.