Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art [Hardcover]
Author: Donald Edward Kendall | Language: English | ISBN: 0195921046 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art
Free download Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art [Hardcover] for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link
Free download Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art [Hardcover] for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link
Dao of Chinese Medicine is the first Western text to shed light on the reality of the ancient healing arts of China, revealing that Chinese medical theories are based on important physiological findings. This is in contrast to the Western interpretation, popularized since the 1940s and 50s that Chinese medicine and acupuncture involve undefined energy and blood circulating through imaginary meridians. Unfortunately, the energy-meridian idea condemned Chinese medicine to be viewed in terms of metaphysical beliefs, limiting its acceptance into mainstream health care. It also led to a growing frustration to reinvent acupuncture in Western terms before understanding the true way (dao) of Chinese medicine. Dao of Chinese Medicine sets the record straight, explaining how ancient Chinese physicians developed a physiologically based medicine with the theories supported by human dissection studies and how Chinese medical theories are consistent with 21st century explanations about how acupuncture works.
Direct download links available for Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art [Hardcover] - Hardcover: 370 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (August 15, 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0195921046
- ISBN-13: 978-0195921045
- Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.9 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #225,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #85 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Pathology > Forensic Medicine
- #97 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Special Topics > History
As a Western-trained biochemist and a critical commentator of Chinese Medicine, I read Donald Kendall's book with keen interest. For more than two decades since the rise of popularity of acupuncture in the West, Chinese Medicine has been regarded as any other folklore medicine derived mainly from empirical experience with little scientific basis, despite the fact that it has been practiced for over two thousand years and has long been the only mainstream healthcare system in China until recent century. Even today, this healing art is still practiced as a complementary medicine in China and in overseas Chinese communities.
In recent years, the quest for herbal-based alternative medicine in the West has made Chinese Medicine increasingly appealing not only to the ordinary populace, but also to western medical professionals. This ancient healing art is said to have embraced the environmental, nutritional as well as emotional influence in its etiology and be capable of providing individualized therapies which could only be realized by the future pharmacogenomic approach.
However, to most westerners Chinese Medicine is as mysterious as the Chinese Ancient Civilization it belongs. The reasons could well be that the classical cannons of this healing art are all written in very concise and hard to understand ancient Chinese, and its underlying therapeutic principles are shrouded in the ancient Chinese worldviews of Five Phases and Yin-Yang.
Deke Kendall proposes that the contents of the nei jing su wen are largely based upon anatomy. Yet, ironically as I read Deke, I have developed a newfound interest in classical acupuncture. While Deke may be dismissed as a reductionist, I think he is actually a great example of the trend espoused by Zhang xi chun and embodied by Jiao shu de. Maintaining the spirit of CM while integrating with the west. Deke most definitely accomplished that goal. His entire presentation of physiology and anatomy is completely from the perspective of Western Medicine serving Chinese, not vice-versa. He asserts that CM will be proven to be real just as it is written, not by scrapping large parts of the corpus to make it fit science (as the modern chinese did somewhat in their state texts). He believes every word of nei jing and he makes strong cases for pulse diagnosis and classical point selection that never made sense to me before.
Far from reducing CM to prevailing reductionistic ideas, Deke shows that there is different way of understanding the neurovascular system and its role in health and disease and the neijing details that. His model explains all the effects of acupuncture satisfactorily and he attempts to ground his ideas in a reading of the classics. Rather than reducing CM with his model, Deke has actually paved the way for EXPANDING western science to accommodate explanations of phenomena hitherto inconceivable. I think work like Deke's is exactly what leads to a paradigm shift. The structures of normal science are challenged from within and a more expansive model is developed as a result.
Anyone who thinks Deke Kendall's work is the scientization of TCM either:
1. has not read the book
2.
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