Mind Over Matter
by Mick Jones and Ahmed Youssif Eltassa
Traditional Chinese medicine increasingly exercises a powerful hold on Western minds.
Vague notions of organic, holistic treatments that achieve miraculous cures beyond the reach of Western science feed a popular belief in traditional cures providing a viable alternative to the prescriptions of a widely mistrusted medical establishment. In China, too, traditional medicine is widely seen as a more useful weapon against illness than Western.
Seventy-five percent of respondents to a Horizon Market Survey poll conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou said they had turned to traditional medicine in the past year, while those who trusted traditional medicine outweighed those favoring Western medicine by 30 to 24 percent (China Daily, 22 January, 1999).
Until very recently, physicians trained in the Western tradition treated such ideas with almost unanimous hostility, condemning traditional medicine as unscientific quackery. Growing appreciation of its demonstrable therapeutic effectiveness has finally led to greater open-mindedness, and a significant trend now is to seek ways of unifying Western medical practice with traditional medicine.
One of the earliest Chinese proponents was Zhao Hongbin, whose family had been practising traditional medicine for five generations before he received a Western medicine college diploma in Tianjin in 1960.
"Treatment by traditional medicine is very good," says Zhao, "but diagnosis in Western medicine is much stronger. I thought it made sense to combine the two, but I was the only one in my class to have this idea ... It took over 30 years for it to be accepted."
Doctors Disdain
Western medicine and traditional medicine originally faced off in a conflict that dates back to the introduction of modern Western medical ideas to China in the early 17th century via Jesuits trained in medicine and the doctors of the East India Company.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions later realized that medicine could serve as an aid to spreading Christianity. The Medical Missionary Society in China was established in 1838 in Canton, marking the start of an organized effort to bring Western medical science into China. By the last third of the nineteenth century, a number of Chinese cities had Western hospitals of a fair size, and medical schools had been founded.
The problem for traditional medicine was not so much in the superiority of Western medicine, but in the attitude of Chinese scholars towards the new knowledge. Instead of integrating Western concepts into traditional medicineÕs universal framework and trying to understand them using their traditional tools of analysis, Chinese scholars of the time preferred simply to mix up the new concepts with traditional ones.
This lead to many theoretical contradictions. For example, in traditional medicine there is no theoretical difference between infection and inflammation, while in Western medicine they are completely different concepts.
Respect for traditional medicine began to decay until it was finally denounced by the Emperor as quackery. After the Republican Revolution in 1911, traditional medicine remained unofficial, and it is still not recognized in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Guarded Red Support
Ironically, the revival of traditional medicine owes a great deal to the victory of the Communist Revolution in 1949. The Communist government faced formidable public health problems, and could only call upon about 70,000 Western-trained physicians for a population of 650 million. The country's estimated 500,000 traditional medicine doctors were therefore brought into the framework of the public health administration, and traditional medicine gained official recognition in 1956.
However, in the same year a special commission was organized to reformulate and standardize the teaching of the traditional medicine all over the country. A standard set of textbooks was carefully prepared, avoiding any metaphysical or spiritual approach to the matter, as such concepts were condemned by communist doctrine as "excrements" of ancient thought.
The more "objective" approach to traditional medicine thereby fostered was very much in line with Western-influenced Qing Dynasty scholars' harsh criticism of traditional medicine's principles and concepts, and has ultimately driven traditional medicine closer to modern Western medicine.
Symptoms of Scientific Thinking
To understand how the two traditions are converging, we need to go back 300 years to the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, and consider the death of Traditional Western Medicine, or Hippocratic Medicine. Renaissance and Enlightenment scholarship brought a sense of objectivity to the medical arts that completely altered the concept of the human being as it related to medicine. In both traditional Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, the human being was conceived of as a kind of "three in one" an indivisible entity comprising body, emotions and mind (in Chinese, jing, qi and shen).
However, Enlightenment-era objectivity demanded the reality of each of these elements be confirmed, and only proof positive, material evidence, was acceptable. Simple human testimony about emotions like love or wrath was not enough to confirm their objective reality.
The same problem affected the mind ?it could only testify to its own subjective reality; no material and objective evidence to prove it could be found.
Therefore, the human body itself, with its undeniable, tangible material reality, was finally taken as the whole human being. A medicine more akin to engineering consequently arose, which despite achieving understanding of the most complicated biochemical and even biomolecular chain of reactions of a human cell, forgot that a cell belonged to a thinking, feeling person.
Missing Link
The realization that something has gone missing is growing in the West, but rather than seeking to recover the lost Western tradition, the tendency is generally to look for something "new" in other traditions.
This accounts for much of the current Western fascination with traditional medicine, at least on the part of the medical fraternity. Curiously, in China itself, the search for material and positive objectivity that began 300 years ago in Europe seems to be happening all over again.
Zhao Hongbin personifies this trend. "TCM lacks an objective foundation," he says. "It has its own theories but lacks evidence; it needs Western scientific methods to prove them."
Such research is now proceeding in Chinese medical institutions, notably Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin, and around the world.
While Europeans reduced the trinity of body, emotions and mind to a single entity, "modern" TCM does retain the dual notion of yin and yang in its approach to the human being, focusing on the importance of achieving "balance" to preserve health.
Thus, for example, TCM dieticians divide foodstuffs into those that are yin and those that are yang, and seek to balance dishes made of both in their prescriptions. Yet in seeking to transform the original TCM into a modern TCM" more technologically oriented and specialized, researchers may be pursuing a goal little different from modern Western medicine: Their studies proceed from the latter's assumptions.
The concepts of jing, qi and shen are known in TCM as the "three treasures", because without them there is nothing. This trinity depicts the very essence of the human being.
Modernity may be desirable in the scientific arts, but remove the underlying principles of traditional medicine and the art itself may vanish.
