traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)
The differences between Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), classical Chinese medicine, and modern medicine are mentioned frequently all over the internet. Many say that the creation of TCM was a deliberate act to destroy the medicine, but is this true? Why is a tradition created? What purpose does it serve?
The development of TCM was a necessary step for me to study the medicine I now practice. In fact, if it were not for TCM, chances are I would have never had the chance to study Chinese medicine at all. Although I do not practice TCM as taught in modern-day schools-and have no interest in doing so-I appreciate that without it I have no idea what I would be doing today.
There is a history behind traditions in medicine. During the Song-Jin-Yuan period, a few authors came up with some innovative ideas based on the classics, picking out pieces and developing “new” ideas. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, a bit of a separation was created because such authors’ works had contradictions. There had always been contradictions in Chinese medicine, and before this time authors were intent on resolving them by integrating all ideas. For the first time, a movement toward picking and choosing one contradiction over another began.
By the Ming and Qing dynasties, “study groups” began forming. Other groups who wanted to ignore the Song-Jin-Yuan era writers begin to emerge and call for a return to the earlier classics. Also during this time, medicine as practiced in the West also began to make its way into China. To the Chinese, this too was just medicine as practiced by foreigners. Much of it was rejected outright as complete insanity until the late 19th century.
So how did TCM come about? The medicine practiced before the beginning of the 20th century was on its way out long before the Cultural Revolution. Chinese intellectuals who started studying materialistic philosophies hated the traditional cosmology, some arguing that it was destroying China and that anything related to it must go. Sun yat-sen, the first leader of Republican China after the empire fell, was trained in western medicine in Japan and had many people close to him that wanted to rid the country of its medicine.
When Mao’s communist party took over, there was already a widespread movement to rid the country of traditional medicine. Mao was eager to drop the medicine until he found out the medical infrastructure to replace it didn’t exist. TCM was born out of the PRC government trying to solve a health crisis after the only medicine that had an infrastructure was already being pulled apart. TCM saved Chinese medicine from complete annihilation. Let’s stop tearing it down and appreciate it for what it is.
Hm.
I think most critiques of TCM online, at least my own, have to do with the uncritical approach most TCM institutions take when teaching the medicine. As with many “dominant paradigms,” it is presented as the one, the only. So many students I meet simply know nothing of the Classics, have been taught by their professors that the Classics are irrelevant for clinical practice, and have inherited many of the same biases against seemingly “esoteric” elements of the Classics that TCM as a system is based upon. This is what I’d like to “tear down.”
I don’t think being critical of something means you are completely against it, that you don’t recognize its value or that you have anything against the human beings who choose to support it.
I just want to see this medicine thrive, and I see so many people becoming demoralized straight out of school as the simplistic approach they were taught fails to help patients and fails to inspire their spirits. That’s all. :)
And what happened to not blogging anymore? :D
I haven’t been blogging lately, you just found an older post :-) I updated a bunch of stuff today and it somehow triggered people’s readers to see these old posts as new…
I agree with everything you said, actually. I’m critical of TCM as a system of medicine as well. I don’t practice it, find it far too simplistic and mechanical, and sometimes I find it downright humorous! And I’m very glad that today there are a lot of people working outside of that paradigm. I personally lost interest in the whole TCM thing in my second year of studies :)
At the time I wrote this, I had been reading articles that tore down TCM as a part of the communist movement. Many people ignore the history from about 1911 to 1949, when traditional medicine was under severe attack by intellectuals who had been studying Western philosophy. Most people seem to think that everything was going smoothly until the communists took over, and this is not the case. If the communists hadn’t changed course and implemented the (simplistic) system of TCM, Chinese medicine may not have survived to the extent it does today.
I am 100% for being critical of it, I just don’t like it when people use false information and reverse propaganda to do so. I think we should be critical of any paradigm, as there is far too much plurality in the history of Chinese medicine to jump on any bandwagon in a religious sort of way.
Thanks for finding this old post…I need to rewrite it and make my thoughts a little clearer :)
Funny – that’s what I get for not checking post dates. :) I get what you are (were) saying. It’s just an example of people being uncritical. I think it’s funny that people who consider themselves to be “dissidents” critiquing the status quo are just as (if not more so) prone to leap to judgment and rattle of sound bites as the institution they are critiquing. That’s certainly true of the TCM/CCM debate.
Here’s to more critical, deep, difficult dialogue!
e