When West Met East
A discourse on how the West cannot decide wholly what it wants from Chinese Medicine.
BEFORE you read on, I want to introduce this article as the sassy essay I wrote in the first trimester of my Chinese medicine degree for a history subject of medicine subject. I’ve referred to this essay a few times on Instagram and it has been MUCH requested.
Also lol at me who tried to pass this off as a religious / philosophical essay about daoism and got an A despite my teacher saying that I didn’t really fill the brief, but that it was a better essay than the question asked. His only criticism was that I did NOT fully grasp the meaning of wu-wei which I clearly whacked in at the last minute IN ORDER TO make it seem like a religious essay about daoism.
This essay seeks not only to consider how Daoism is relevant to the practice of Chinese medicine today, but also how it’s displacement produces, at times, an unfaithful rendering of a holistic form. By exploring this, we can only hope that we are able to engage with the disharmony between Chinese and Western medicines, including the West’s misuse of East Asian Medicines. The practice of this indigenous medicine – whose roots of religion, philosophy and cultural influence are clearly visible today if one cares to look – has been problematised by its very modernisation and globalisation.
Selectivity
In his preface to the Neijng of the Yellow Emperor, Maoshing Ni (1995, p.xii) describes the text as “one of the most important classics of Daoism”. He goes on to explain Daoist medical principles, whereby a human being is treated holistically, within a universal frame. With Traditional Chinese Medicine’s (hereon referred to as TCM) export to the West, core values have been stripped away in order to suit “modern scientific standards” (Xu, Bauer, Hendry, Fan, Zhao & Duez, 2013, p.132). We see TCM à la carte for ‘believers’ to nibble on sparingly (Tsai, 2006, p1452), which begs the question: is there anything wrong with selectivity? Surely a person with their own best interests at heart and enough care to seek an alternative treatment method might house intuition great enough to understand what their body needs. Or perhaps, we could argue, Western arrogance has taken something whole and applied it’s own agenda to it, missing the fundamental principle of TCM to treat what does not yet need to be treated. Perhaps the West is struggling to fathom that there is indeed another option other than to merely treat the ailing.
The relevance of Daoism in today’s practice of TCM, specifically in the West, is paramount. With an ailing medical system, which fails to answer questions, the West would do well to welcome a whole new way of thinking, rather than taking pieces of a whole and wondering why they don’t work. As will be discussed in the proceeding paragraph, the marriage of Eastern and Western (WM) medicines might be a dysfunctional one.
Integration
The danger of a controlled integration is exemplified by Volker Scheid (2006, p.5) when he posits that that which we believe we know about TCM in the West is indeed fictional assertions of it’s harbingers from the 1960’s. Wu-wei leaps to mind, when we explore the implications of actively intervening with an experientially effective form of medicine. Wu-wei – meaning no active intervention – is a well-known Daoist concept. While the ancient Daoists held that exploration of nature could inform ideas about human beings (Unschuld, 1985, p.101), the illusory phases, which Xu et al. supply, (2013, p.132) exhibits an inherent need of science to make palatable to western sensibilities, that which does not fit it’s mold. He places phase one as the 1950’s to the 1970’s. It is within this time, as we have seen, that Scheid (2006, p.5) observed the intervention of science to modernise what is ancient, but foreign to be familiar to a Western patient. While this may have succeeded in helping to popularise TCM, it is evident in the repercussions that application of ancient ideas cannot be artificially legitimised by pseudo-practitioners in order to make it fit. Scheid (2006, p.5) exemplifies this by discussing a failed attempt to treat a menopausal patient, only to discover that his textbook learning did not equal up to his own trusted knowledge. This was explained by his discovery that as menopause was not a recognised condition in ancient Chinese times, what he had learnt was doctored facts to fit what the West thought that it needed. To quote a master, “One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know” (Lau, 1963, p.117).
I’m jumping in to explain the above paragraph, because I can’t be bothered re-writing it, and it’s a little tanked by my attempts to sound intellectual.
Basically, this bloke Volker Scheid was attempting to treat menopause through a TCM lens. TCM is a modernised (and some would say bastardised) repackaging of Chinese medicine. It was created to fit into a western medical palette. A lot of conditions (like menopause) WERE actually described in ancient texts, but the way those texts worked was based on SYMPTOMS, not a diagnosis (like menopause, endometriosis, iron deficiency).
So as practitioners in modern Australia, we try to explain things to patients using modern language and this can actually water down the treatment that we give, IF we’re not careful.
What Scheid had to do in order to be successful, was not to go to the TCM books and focus on “menopause” but to look at the symptoms and Chinese medical PATTERNS (our form of diagnosis), in order to properly treat his patient. Basically he had to trust his gut and what he could SEE.
Travelling TCM
Let us now focus our discussion on the idea of globalisation and whether the West is coming to share in an experientially effective medicine or gradually bastardising a pure way. Unschuld (1985, p.104) describes the way in which Daoists of old idealised a way of living, which was free from societal conventions. Pointing us in the direction of Lao Tzu, we discover a precept, which warns or guides us against what can only be described as globalisation (Lau, 1963, p.142). Let us call in to question the damage done by the flagrant disregard of the most fundamental Daoist principle of TCM, namely a human being’s intrinsic link with nature, and it’s resultant effect of disabling the healing properties we can see to be true.
We must digress to give credit where credit is due to the Western practitioners who uphold the tenets of true Chinese medicine and strive to instill it in others. The above arguments should be considered, not by any means as an industry standard among all practitioners (indeed not!), but through the lens of (a generalised) WM, which seemingly seeks to debunk what it cannot physically grasp. This essay is not here to disparage the involvement of Chinese medicine in the West, but to explore the resultant effects of doing so piecemeal (Scheid, 1999). One can only wonder what the parents of Chinese medicine would think of the effects of globalisation on their faith and medicine. Let us dare to dream of Zhuang Zhi rolling his eyes at efforts to prolong into immortality Traditional Chinese Medicine (Unschuld, 1985, p.106).
This essay has sought to contextualise Daoism within a globalised and Westernised contemporary traditional Chinese medicine framework and asked, can it be that the way in which we might fortify our ill selves is the very thing we fear; a true holism where our spirits are treated and healed along with any physical manifestations. Perhaps it would be beneficial for Western medicine to incorporate wu-wei into it’s grab bag.