Tui-Na is the branch of Chinese medicine that treats the patient using only the physician's hands to bring about a change in the patient's condition. Like Chinese medicine itself, Tui-Na can be viewed as a sum of three different styles or systems. It essentially boils down to three main skills - soft tissue treatment, skeletal alignment, and energy issuance. Tui-Na is the least invasive of the 3 modalities of traditional Chinese medicine, with no foreign substance whatsoever penetrating the patient's skin or being ingested. While the casual observer may draw parallels with massage or chiropractic, Tui-Na is a very different science when viewed as a whole, even though there are techniques within Tui-Na that resemble the other two modalities of manual therapy.