Great post! I think Will Morris is just great and does a tremendous service to our profession, don’t you? I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
Thank you.
Tamara ZumMallen, Licensed Acupuncturist
Beverly Hills, CA

Thanks Tamara! I appreciate your comment, and will keep an eye out for Will Morris doing more with CAM in the future.
-amy

I studied TCM at Beijing University, where I lived for 6 years. I am fluent in Chinese and was the only Caucasian (or non-Chinese for that matter) in my class of 41 students. Although China has gone through major social changes throughout its long history, the foundational philosophies of Yin-yang, Wu-xing and Jing-qi-shen are still alive and well in the culture today; they are not, however, associated with spirituality or religion as much as they are simply the underpinnings of the Chinese world-view. TCM is a science in its own right, based on natural laws, just as is Western science. It is simply the way of conceptualizing that makes them different. TCM has always been an applied science. I feel it is important for practitioners of TCM to portray the medicine from its strong points of radial thinking and synthetic analysis, rather than a more nebulous spiritual viewpoint.
Warren Fischer, Dr. TCM
Dean, Academy of Classical Oriental Sciences http://www.acos.org

I agree that there are many different aspects of TCM, and that it is important for both practitioners and patients to see all of them. Thank you for your comment.

Who decides what knowledge is and how it is built? Research design, implementation and presentation of findings are influenced by socially defined criteria at the interpersonal, institutional and governmental levels. In a culture focused upon a particular notion of science as the gold standard of the randomized controlled trial, these politics affect the ability for acupuncture and Oriental medicine to receive assessment that is rich in data and that captures the complex nature of the practice and its outcomes.

At the heart of the problem, we find the politics of race, gender and social class permeating the discourse of evidence and they cannot be addressed as “side issues”.
[The rise of reductionist science was linked with the commercialization of science and resulted in the domination of women and non-Western peoples. Their diverse knowledge systems were not treated as legitimate ways of knowing. With commercialization as the objective, reductionism became the criterion of scientific validity. Nonreductionst and ecological ways of knowing, and nonreductionist and ecological ways of knowing were pushed out and marginalized. Shiva 1997, p.25]