Here’s to more critical, deep, difficult dialogue!

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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 :)

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

“Heiner Fruehauf has contributed a great understanding of what distinguishes the Classical perspective from modern TCM. There seems to be arguments being made here and elsewhere suggesting that these princples are a gloss introduced by Westerners and that Chinese medicine is essentialy more technical and reductionist. Apologies if I have missunderstood.”

Andrew, you have understood exactly correctly. I believe Bob Flaws is one of those who takes this position, if I understand various blog posts that he has made on this topic he is saying that people have made too much of the conceptual difference between CCM and TCM. I recently discovered Herr Freuhauf’s writings and would have to disagree with Bob and agree with you.

As a recent graduate of a TCM Medical college, I gradually (in the last few years) became aware of major omissions in the coverage of classical Chinese medical theory and gaps in the theory that were taught which inspired me to search, on my own, for the missing pieces. That search lead directly to CCM and writings such as those by van Nghi. Most unfortunately, van Nghi’s writings seem to be under the control of an institute and a school thus blocking wider dissemination and it becomes necessary to do a hunt across the web and in different languages to acquire the hard to find texts and seminars of van Nghi and Dzung, his protoge’.

My search for a reasonable intro to Classical Chinese language led straight to Richard Goodman’s wonderful introductory books, which should be used as textbooks in every TCM college. I’m fairly certain that my college will be introducing such language training in the near future and I have urged them to adopt Goodman’s texts, though no decision has yet been made.