Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States

In Search of Spiritual Meaning and Ultimate Health

By (author) Emily S. Wu

Publication date:

06 June 2013

Length of book:

244 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739173664

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originated from the traditional medical system in the Chinese civilization, with influences from the Daoist and Chinese folk traditions in bodily cultivation and longevity techniques. In the past few decades, TCM has become one of the leading alternative medical systems in the United States. This book demonstrates the fluidity of a medical ideological system with a rich history of methodological development and internal theoretical conflicts, continuing to transform in our postmodern world where people and ideas transcend geographic, ethnic, and linguistic limitations. The unique historical trajectories and cultural dynamics of the American society are critical nutrients for the localization of TCM, while the constant traffic of travelers and immigrants foster the globalizing tendency of TCM. The practitioners in this book represent an incredible range of clinical applications, personal styles, theoretical rationalizations, and business models. What really unifies all these practitioners is not their specific practices but the goal of these practices. The shared goal is to strive for health, not just health in terms of the lack of illness but the ultimate health of achieving perfect balance in every aspect of the being of a person—physically, mentally, spiritually, and energetically.

Preface
Personal Beginning
Introduction
Chapter 1: Contextualization
Chapter 2: History of Local TCM
Chapter 3: Medical Training and Identity Formation
Chapter 4: TCM Healers in the Chinese Community
Chapter 5: TCM as Complementary Medicine
Chapter 6: TCM as Alternative Medicine
Chapter 7: Creating a Space for Psychic Healing
Chapter 8: Going to the Culturally Authentic
Chapter 9: Environmentalism and Lifestyle Changes
Chapter 10: The Happenings in an Acupuncture Clinic
Chapter 11: The Embodied Spirituality of Qi
Chapter 12: Ideal Body and the Concept of Health
Chapter 13: Concluding Analysis

Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States is an insightful and captivating ethnography of Chinese medicine practitioners in the San Francisco Bay area, one that reveals their socialization as students and experiences as clinicians into a world where East meets West perhaps more so than in any place in the United States. Religious studies scholar Emily S. Wu has written a masterful cultural interpretive or phenomenological examination of both Asian American and European American practitioners who have sought to adapt the psychic, spiritual, cultural, and environmental insights of an ancient medical tradition to a post-modern society where many people have sought meaningful alternatives or complements to Western biomedicine which all too still remains reductionist in its treatment of illness and the healing of the body politic. Her book makes an important contribution to the study of medical pluralism and complementary and alternative medical systems in American society.