The Sacred in the Scientific: Ambiguous Practices of Science in Tibetan Medicine

Rethinking the history of medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine

Tags:

• China
• Colonialism
• Historiography
• History of Medicine
• History, 20th Century
• History, Ancient
• History, Medieval
• Medicine, Chinese Traditional
• Medicine, Unani
• Pakistan

Notes:

• In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said’s interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said’s advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.

Medicine and History as Theoretical Tools in a Confucian Pragmatism

Tibetan Medicine and Regeneration

"Gambling for Qi": Suicide and Family Politics in a Rural North China County

Falungong: recent developments in Chinese notions of healing

Tags:

• Anomie
• Asian Americans
• Attitude to Health
• Buddhism
• China
• Confucianism
• Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
• Health promotion
• Health Status
• Humans
• Medicine, Chinese Traditional
• Morale
• Morals
• Nurse's Role
• Philosophy, Medical
• Religious Philosophies
• Social Change
• spirituality
• Transcultural Nursing
• Unemployment

Notes:

• Transcultural nursing literature provides a rich picture of prominent Chinese health-related beliefs derived from the traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. However, these traditional beliefs are being challenged and modified in response to public discussion of a new spiritual movement, Falungong (also spelled Falun Gong). This movement calling for personal and social renewal has arisen in reaction to significant political and economic upheavals in Chinese society. This paper presents an overview of the Falungong movement and the health beliefs it advances. Implications for U.S. nursing practice are discussed.

New Geographies of Chinese Medicine

The Transformations of Tibetan Medicine

Notes:

• This article presents a cultural and historical analysis of 20th-century Tibetan medicine. In its expansion into the state bureaucracy, Tibetan medicine has acceded to institutional modernity through transformations in theory, practice, and methods for training physicians. Despite Chinese rule in Tibet, however, Tibetan medicine has not yielded completely to state interests. With the collapsing of the traditionally pluralistic Tibetan health system into the professional sector of Tibetan medicine, contemporary Tibetan medicine has become to the laity a font of ethnic revitalization and resistance to the modernization policies of the Chinese state. These processes are particularly evident in the elaboration of disorders of rlung, a class of sicknesses that, collectively, have come to symbolize the suffering inherent in rapid social, economic, and political change.

Chinese medicine and its modernization demands

Tags:

• Humans
• Medicine, Chinese Traditional

Notes:

• As a typical naturally derived drug, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has developed for several thousands of years and accumulated abundant human pharmacological information and experience to form an integrated theory system. However, the problems of lower product quality, substandard codes and standards, and under-enhancement of fundamental research have restricted its further development and acceptance internationally. In this review, we explain the origin and developmental history of TCM, species involved in TCM, and their distributions in biotaxy. According to the status and problems, it is concluded that TCM modernization has become necessary and urgent. Modernization of TCM means the combination of TCM with modern technology, modern academic thoughts, and modern scientific culture, in which the most important point is to elucidate the active component of TCM, especially the material foundation of compound prescriptions and their pharmacodynamic mechanisms. Technology of analytical chemistry (HPLC, HPCE, HSCCC, etc.) and molecular biology (patch clamp, gene clamp, gene chip, fluorescent probe, DNA TUNEL assay, in situ hybridization, etc.) are useful tools to realize the modernization of TCM. Based on those studies and achievements and coupled with computer technology, all TCM products will achieve digitalization and normalization. TCM modernization will provide the world with useful reference information on traditional medicines.

The New Face of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Tai chi and meditation: A conceptual (re)synthesis?

Tags:

• Chronic Disease
• Coronary Disease
• Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
• Holistic Health
• Humans
• Meditation
• Mind-Body Therapies
• Musculoskeletal Diseases
• Pain
• Self Efficacy
• Stress, Psychological
• Tai Ji

Qi Gong's relationship to educational kinesiology: A qualitative approach

Medicine--the art of humaneness: on ethics of traditional Chinese medicine

Tags:

• Beneficence
• Confucianism
• Ethical Theory
• Ethics, Medical
• History, Medieval
• History, Modern 1601-
• Human Characteristics
• Humanism
• Intention
• Medicine, Chinese Traditional
• Moral Obligations
• Paternalism
• Religious Philosophies
• Trust
• Value of Life
• Virtues

Notes:

• This essay discusses the ethics of traditional Chinese medicine. After a brief remark on the history of traditional Chinese medical ethics, the author outlines the Confucian ethics which formed the cultural context in which traditional Chinese medicine was evolving and constituted the core of its ethics. Then he argued that how Chinese physicians applied the principles of Confucian ethics in medicine and prescribed the attitude a physician should take to himself, to patients and to his colleagues. In the last part of the essay he discusses the characteristics of traditional Chinese medical ethics.

Remodeling the Arsenal of Chinese Medicine: Shared Pasts, Alternative Futures

Notes:

• The discourse on alternative medicine assumes that medical practices exist as distinctive medical systems that compete with each other in plural health care systems. Anthropological and historical research clearly demonstrates, however, that this is not so. Many so-called traditional medicines are revealed as inventions of distinctly modern regimes of knowledge and institutional practice, while the political needs of healers and the epistemological desires of researchers converge in the construction of distinctive medical practices for description, classification, and comparison. This article draws on genealogy as a possible way out of this impasse. It shows how different generations of physicians of Chinese medicine employed the same four core concepts to reflect on their practice, imbuing them with ever new meanings to relate them to the changing demands of clinical and political practice. Examining these core concepts reveals something about the essence of Chinese medicine without reducing our analysis to a misguided search for cultural essences.

The Origin of Chinese Folk Medicine

Qigong: where did it come from? Where does it fit in science? What are the advances?

Tags:

• Attitude to Health
• Breathing Exercises
• China
• Evidence-Based Medicine
• Humans
• Mind-Body Relations (Metaphysics)
• Qi
• Research Design
• Tai Ji
• United States

ABC of Complementary Medicine: Acupuncture

Body, Discourse, and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Chinese Qigong

Does It Take a Miracle? Negotiating Knowledges, Identities, and Communities of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Medicine Is a Humane Art The Basic Principles of Professional Ethics in Chinese Medicine

Notes:

• The value system of medical ethics in China has a long tradition that can be traced back to ancient times. Those values are reflected in the (Confucian) precept that “medicine is a humane art.” That is, medicine is not only a means to save people’s lives, but also a moral commitment to love people and free them from suffering through personal caring and medical treatment. Although this precept has been well accepted as the basic principle of professional ethics as general principle that emphasizes doctors’ self-accomplishment and self-restraint, there has never been a universally accepted professional code and binding principles in Chinese medicine comparable to the Hippocratic Oath in western medicine.