Imagining Chinese Medicine

In the health care professions today, research guides best clinical practice. Yet, the methodological constraints required by the two main branches of research into Chinese medicine-bio-scientific and socio-historical-rarely assist Chinese medicine students, practitioners, or clinical researchers with treatment and practice issues. A great deal of bio-scientific research assumes that it must be possible to utilise and test Chinese medicine from within a biomedical framework. However, by isolating therapeutic techniques and substances and standardising treatment protocols, bio-scientific research removes Chinese medicine's inbuilt flexibility and responsiveness to clinical instances and changes. While researchers in the historical and social sciences can reveal the sophisticated discourses built around Chinese medicine's distinctive approach to knowing the world and the body-person, they normally do not discuss the implications of their work for contemporary clinical practice. The paper advocates a synthetic approach using multidisciplinary sources within and adjacent to the field of Chinese medicine. Multidisciplinary researchers contest the simplified and biomedicalised version of Chinese medicine generally available in English speaking countries today. They can assist English speakers to approach Chinese medicine's traditional perspectives, demonstrate their relevance for contemporary clinical practice and help restore the traditional connectedness between Chinese medicine's theoretical concepts and its treatment methods.

Journal of Medieval Worlds

It would be impossible to do justice to Imagining Chinese Medicine. The editors, Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett, have united scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America to provide the first sustained look at the intersection of visual culture and healing in China. By visual culture, I am referring to a wide variety of material related to the body: drawings, diagrams, color illustrations, advertisements, photographs, and cartoons, to name but a few. This volume is thus a formidable undertaking and reflects more than a decade of collaborative work. The 35 essays and two general introductions are intentionally wide-ranging. The editors have adopted a broad understanding of both China and medicine. "China" refers not only to the imagination of a state centered in the Yellow River Valley, but also a geographic mass that incorporated people of different ethnicities, religious, and linguistic persuasions. By "medicine, " they mean the multiplicity of strategies that people have used to understand and cure the broken human (or animal) body, as well as to promote vitality and to preserve health. The essays thus consider not only practitioners of the learned classical tradition, but also religious healers, veterinarians, Daoist practitioners, and adherents of sexual cultivation. The essays also span many centuries, mediums, and languages, from the Shuangbaoshan figurines and Mawangdui illustrations of the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 CE), to the medieval images recovered from the Dunhuang caves, to the color colophon pictures found in state-sponsored herbals in Ming China (1368-1644), to contemporary comic books. The essays also include a number of papers about the reception of Chinese visual imagery outside of China-for example, an examination of the images that accompany the quotations of the Classic of Childbirth (Taichan jing) in the medieval Japanese compendium, the Ishimpô; and Chinese medical imaginary in the broader East Asian, medieval Persian, early modern Dutch, and colonial Japanese contexts. Sino-Tibetan and Central Asian traditions also receive their share of attention. The essays diverge in terms of their intellectual styles and goals. Some of the essays provide a useful survey of sources, which will spawn new directions in the scholarship. For instance, the contributions of Zheng Jinsheng and Cao Hui, "Observational Drawing and Fine Art in Chinese Materia Medica Illustration" and "Polychrome Illustrations in the Ming Bencao Literature, " survey the 40 illustrated bencao, which have not until recently

2018

A short summary of some of the features of Chinese medicine. How its model is different from Western Medicine. Topics covered include theory, history, and practices. It is suggested that Chinese medicine can be a viable method of healing despite a lack of understanding in the Western medical context.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2013

2018

With the introduction and development of Western medicine in China and the continuous spread of the concept of integration of Chinese and Western medicine, after decades of collision and dialogue with Western medicine, Chinese medicine practitioners have studied their education model, medication ideas, diagnostic methods and medical principles. More and more have begun to favor Western medicine. The original exchange between Chinese medicine and Western medicine has become a unilateral invasion of Western medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine has moved toward an increasingly Westernized path. Nowadays, we can see that Traditional Chinese medicine treatment does not seek the principles of traditional Chinese medicine. The medicinal properties of traditional Chinese medicine have become a form, and the result is that its clinic effects are not significant. The patient's distrust has formed a situation in which Chinese medicine can't help. It is hard to believe that making Chinese Medicine into Western medicine and discard the principle of Traditional Chinese medicine but save the Chinese medicines alone have become the future of many Chinese medicine practitioners who specialize in studying Chinese medicine. This article believes that it is imperative to choose a better way to understand, spread and develop the knowledge of Chinese medicine, so that Chinese medicine is no longer as difficult as Chinese traditional culture, so that more people understand Chinese medicine, let more people approach Chinese medicine, and jump out of the Western medical model. Compared to Western medicine, only do we understand and develop Chinese medicine from the perspective of Bio-Cosmological view, we can give full play to the true strengths and advantages of Chinese medicine, and only guiding in this view, Chinese medicine can truly have a growing future.

Asian Medicine, 2016

Routledge eBooks, 2022

This is a research paper I did for a course at my College. It discusses the use of Chinese medicine and Western medicine in the treatment of Cancer. This is not a professional research paper and is the first of many papers I have done for my degree in Complementary and Alternative Health.

Asian Medicine, 2016

This article reproduces an exchange between academics and practitioners at the Sixth International Congress on Traditional Asian Medicine (ICTAM VI) meeting in Austin about how the history of Chinese medicine could be more meaningful, interesting, and valuable to clinicians. It provides a brief history of exchanges, the panel proposal, the abstracts of the panelists, an edited transcript of the conversation, and some concluding remarks from the participants. As more and more practitioners of Chinese medicine outside of China spend time in China, learn Chinese, become culturally and linguistically bilingual or multilingual, they seek more knowledge about what they practise than they can get in current publications in English or other European languages. The panel and this article are intended to encourage further exchange, conversations, and cooperation that will lead to new histories of Chinese medicine relevant for practitioners as much as for other academics.