Customer Reviews

Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (Science and Cultural Theory)

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One of our biggest problems as Chinese Medicine practitioners in the U.S. is that we don't have access to all the Chinese literature, nor do we really know what it's like in China. This book, with a number of great vignettes, bursts a number of bubbles for American TCM practitioners. Scheid is not only an acupuncturist, but also an anthropologist, so to him these vignettes are case studies...

For example: a doctor integrates biomedicine and chinese medicine to treat meniere's disease, how politics can decide that liver qi xu doesn't exist, pattern differentiation's significance historically and politically, and the in's and out's of apprenticeship.

It not only gives you a broader view of chinese medicine past and present, but also provides herbal prescription ideas and case studies unlike what we've read in English before.

I have had the privilege of studying traditional Chinese medicine in Mainland China. It was interesting that many of the Western practitioners who were with me were scandalized by what they saw as the destruction of traditional medicine by contemporary Chinese doctors. If I can generalize, the Chinese are great pragmatists and for them their medicine - including acupuncture and herbalism - is in a constant state of growth and development. By contrast the Westerners thought that traditional Chinese medicine was an ancient system stuck in amber.

This book highlights all of these points and many others.

The author is a medical anthropologist as well as a practitioner of Chinese medicine who reads Chinese.

What he does is to weave together traditional anthropological concepts with Chinese philosophy, social psychology, science and technology to create a revealing tapestry. Although there is evidence that acupuncture has been in use for millennia, its current form is no more than fifty years old, and owes as much to politics as it does to tradition.

This is the way that Chinese medicine has adapted and synthesized new discoveries and new influences over the centuries. It is now quite normal to find traditional Chinese practitioners who use both traditional diagnosis using the pulse and the tongue, together with X-rays and blood work. A treatment may include not only acupuncture and herbs, but also some conventional Western medicine. This book highlights the ways in which Chinese medicine is not so much a thing as a dynamic process.

The author uses case studies from his own fieldwork in China to examine traditional medicine from a variety of perspectives. Not only how it is practiced, but also how it is mandated and then regulated by the government, and how it is shaped by its environment.

If you have any interest in Chinese medicine, the history of ideas, or how the Chinese tend to think about medical, practical and even political issues, this is a terrific book that I recommend highly.