Traditional medical systems describe the body in terms that have no equivalent in physiology, and attempts to translate them usually satisfy nobody. The mismatch follows from what each system had available when it was built.
They were built from what could be observed
These systems developed over centuries without microscopy, biochemistry or systematic dissection, so their categories were derived from what a practitioner could see, feel and hear.
Pulse quality, complexion, temperature, appetite, sleep, digestion and response to seasons were the available data, and the frameworks organise exactly those observations.
Their concepts therefore describe patterns of function across a whole person rather than structures within them.
The categories are functional rather than anatomical
When such a system names an organ, it usually refers to a cluster of functions and associations attributed to it rather than to the physical structure of that name.
The clusters were assembled from observed co-occurrence — which symptoms tended to appear together and which interventions tended to shift them as a group.
This is why mapping such a term onto the corresponding anatomical organ produces immediate contradictions and misrepresents both systems.
Pattern recognition is the operating method
Diagnosis in these systems means identifying which recognised pattern a presentation fits, and two people with the same complaint can receive different treatments on that basis.
That individualisation is a genuine feature and also the reason these approaches are difficult to evaluate with trial designs that require standardised treatment.
Trials that standardise the intervention test something the system does not claim to do, while trials that individualise it lose comparability.
Empirical content and theoretical framework can come apart
Centuries of observation can accumulate reliable knowledge about what tends to help even when the explanation attached to it is not the operative mechanism.
Several plant preparations from these traditions have yielded compounds with demonstrable pharmacological activity, which vindicates the observation without vindicating the framework.
Separating the two is the fairest way to read these systems, and it is what pharmacological research has effectively done.
What follows for someone using both
The systems are not commensurable, so a practitioner in one cannot meaningfully assess the other's findings, and neither should be asked to.
Herbal preparations are pharmacologically active and can interact with prescribed medicines, so every practitioner involved needs to know what else is being taken.
Regulation of these practices differs greatly between countries and changes over time, so what training or oversight a title implies is worth checking locally.