To find a method to deal with complex symptom terminologies of Chinese medicine by using the concept of symptom elements, in order to solve various terminology issues and support the medical information standardization.Methods:Based on Chinese medical records database，the symptom terminologies are categorized, cleaned and extracted to obtain symptom elements.Results: We obtained over 80,000 symptom related data from clinical medicine database by means of a basic categorization method.Conclusion: Complex symptom terminologies can be effectively handled by using symptom elements and categorization according to term attributes. This is conducive to academic communication of Chinese medicine，and tapping the potentials of Chinese medicine.