I often meet patients with back pain who ask me: Doctor, is my back pain a kidney deficiency? It is not that I am not willing to answer such a question from a patient, because it involves different medical systems and theories of Chinese and Western medicine, and it is really difficult to explain clearly to an ordinary patient in a short time. Low back pain is a common disease in orthopedics, and from the perspective of Western medicine diagnosis, there are many causes that can cause low back pain. There are spinal origin low back pain, such as spinal degeneration, disc herniation, etc.; there are soft tissue origin low back pain, such as lumbar muscle strain, etc.; there are visceral origin low back pain, such as kidney stones, etc.; there are inflammatory low back pain, such as ankylosing spondylitis, etc.; there are psychoneurogenic low back pain, such as somatization disorder, etc. In the past, it was said that “patients with low back pain and doctors with headaches”, which illustrates the complexity of low back pain diseases. Some of them need auxiliary X-ray, CT, MRI and other examinations to make a clear diagnosis, and even then, not all low back pain can be diagnosed clearly. In Chinese medicine, “dialectical treatment” is emphasized, which is a generalization of the pathological reflections at a certain stage of the disease development process and reflects the essence of pathological changes at this stage. Then, according to the nature of different pathological changes, that is, the results of the identification of evidence, determine the corresponding treatment plan. For example, the evidence of low back pain can be summarized as: kidney deficiency, blood stasis, cold and dampness, etc. According to the different evidence, treatment methods can be taken to tonify the kidney and strengthen the waist, invigorate blood circulation, disperse cold and remove dampness. In other words, kidney deficiency is only one of the TCM evidence types of low back pain disease. The “kidney” in Chinese medicine is not a single internal organ of the human body, but a system that covers reproductive, urinary, neurological, skeletal and other tissues and organs of the human body, and plays a role in regulating human functions and providing “vital energy” for life activities. The role of “prime mover”, is the foundation of the innate. To put it bluntly, the kidney in Chinese medicine is actually an abstract concept, a functional unit, and not the organ called “kidney” that corresponds to Western medicine. Kidney deficiency is only one of the TCM evidence of low back pain, not all low back pain is kidney deficiency.