Paul Unschuld's unanswerable question /science

[Guest guest]

>It is pluralistic and heterogenous

>It is incoherent

>It is not scientific in any narrow, modern Western cultural sense

>It is associated with ways of thinking and approaching reality which

>are different from the modern Western worldview

--

 

So, the next time a patient asks me about Chinese medicine, this is

what I should say to them?!

 

Rory

 

 

Dear Emanuel and Rory,

 

I think that it's important to look at the glass as half full.

Pluralistic, heterogenous, and incoherent? perhaps, but recall an

exchange I had with Ken a couple of weeks ago where I was astounded to

realize that characters have served to unite " China "

for at least the last 2000 years and that unity of written language

gives the Chinese the

emormous advantage over any other culture or civilization in our planet's

history, of being able to have billions of people over a large area

communicate in a common written language. It is that unity which by

necessity creates some degree of unified and distinctly unique " chinese "

thought, in medicine too.

 

Couldn't you also say that science seeks to create order out of observed,

often chaotic phemonena, and define those phenomena according to rules

which seem to work, that is until they are disproven? In essence to try

to establish the finity of the previously unknown or infinite?

Knowledge, therefore, would be a relative term, and would only be as good

as the validity of information acquired. That is (from my small

perspective) why we can indeed consider Oriental Medicine to be a

science, like all sciences constantly evolving, and like all sciences

very imperfect.

 

Yehuda

 

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[Guest guest]

At 1:26 AM -0700 10/20/03, yehuda l frischman wrote:

>That is (from my small

>perspective) why we can indeed consider Oriental Medicine to be a

>science, like all sciences constantly evolving, and like all sciences

>very imperfect.

--

Yehuda,

 

You are not alone in your perspective. I was reviewing some tapes of

Paul Unschuld speaking at the 2001 PCOM conference yesterday, and he

referred to the evolution of knowledge described in the Su Wen as

science.

 

Rory

--