SummaryCAM researchers commonly treat traditional medicines as unchanging systems. This article questions the validity of this approach by examining the treatment of menopausal syndrome by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Such treatment strategies were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. While they determine TCM treatment of menopausal syndrome in the West, physicians in China and Japan use many other treatment strategies from within the wider Chinese medical tradition in clinical practice. Cultural variability in the manifestation of menopausal syndrome furthermore questions the usefulness of simply importing treatment strategies from China to the West. This leads me to conclude that Chinese medicine as such can never be evaluated by means of clinical research. What we can do is use Chinese medicine as a resource for thinking about illness, and for formulating clinical interventions that may then be assessed using methods of evidence based research.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is today practiced worldwide, rivaling biomedicine in terms of its globalization. One of the most common TCM diagnoses is “Liver qi constraint,” which, in turn, is commonly treated by an herbal formula dating back to the 10th century. In everyday TCM practice, biomedical disease categories such as depression or anxiety and popular disease categories such as stress are often conflated with the Chinese medical notion of constraint. Medical anthropologists, meanwhile, argue that constraint reveals to us a distinctive aesthetics of constructing body/persons in Chinese culture, while psychologists seek to define constraint as a distinctive psychiatric disorder distinctive from depression and anxiety. All of these actors agree in defining constraint as a concept dating back two thousand years to the very origins of Chinese medicine. This article disassembles the articulations by means of which these different facts about constraint are constructed. It shows how ideas about constraint as a disorder caused by the penetration of external pathogens into the body were gradually transformed from the eleventh century onward into constraint as an emotion-related disorder, while treatment strategies were adjusted to match perceptions about body/self that developed among the gentry elite of southeast China in late imperial China.
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