Today started out badly for me. Before 10 AM, I have found myself writing out two apology emails. One was addressed to a person whom I inadvertently stood up this morning because being the incorrigible doofus that I am, I forgot about my appointment to meet with her. This was supposed to be a little shadowing experience for me at the NIH hospital and I blew it by one too many snooze and a terribly distracted mind. =( The other email I sent out in apology was to a girl from small group who invited me to her wedding and requested a respond by date of yesterday. Coincidentally, I saw her last night and she asked me point blank if I was going to go. I had not planned to, but caught off-guard as I was, I could only say that I would get back to her on this. Then I went home and looked at the date to respond by and it was OH SHIT, oh Crap, oh goofey Emily strikes again!! Let me tell you, having to start the day off with a round of apologies is a stinky way to start a day. I spent all of this morning with a strong urge to kick myself in the behind.
However, the bright spot in my day was a seminar that I attended in the afternoon. It was a topic on the Chinese traditional medicine treatment of SARS. A historian from JHU delivered the talk and her primary focus was on how traditonal Chinese medicine practitioners frame the idea of SARS within the context of traditional medicinal views. It was both enlighening, refreshing and familiar all at once. I felt as I did back at Columbia, back in one of my old East Asian profs’ classes, engaged and attentive and absorbed.
Anyway, crux of her argument is one of a paradigm shift. It’s not a shift necessarily from Western traditional views to Eastern traditional views, it’s a shift from unilateralism to multilateralism. It’s a conscious effort to move out of one view of seeing an idea to being able to see that there are multiple ways of looking at the same thing. She points out how western medical professionals tend to view SARS within the context of a viral pandemic, an outside entity that invades a body and can be transmitted from host to host. However, within the context of traditional chinese medicine (TCM), SARS is looked upon as a “type” of condition, a wenbing, one that is a result of multiple factors such as climate, environmental conditions, one’s own physiological conditons and predispositions and that SARS is categorically a “wind-heat” illness. She also mentions how the isalis root or “banlangeng” was employed to counter the effects of this wenbing. I am actually quite familiar with banlangeng myself, because whenever anyone in my family has a cold or sore throat, they are immediately directed to make a banlangeng potion for themselves to combat the onset of the fever or cold.
Anyway, to sum up my feelings about this talk, I feel the topic has ignited my interest in understanding traditional Chinese medicine further. This is all in coherence with my natural affinity and disposition to understand more of my ethnic and cultural heritage. I have resolved before the end of the talk to begin studying this more in earnest, because it is such a mysterious yet astounding tradition to me. Even the language of TCM appears to be couched in esoteric and rather mystical language like “wind”, “heat”, “yin-yang imbalances.” My private hope is to one day achieve a level of competency in TCM to the point where I can even incorporate some of it in my future practice. But let’s not yet count the chickens before they hatch, right?
1 comment:
You're not treating me with that sort of baffoonery.
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