TCM is simply another school of thought in Chinese Medicine.

It no more represents the entire field than the "spleen-stomach" school or SHL does.

It has many weaknesses and many strengths, and defining these will become my life's work. (eh? What was that last thing?)

Which dict?

When your understanding is being filtered through a dictionary, the choice of dictionary becomes very important.

I've wondered in the past if I had gotten the Wiseman/Feng PD when I first started studying CM (rather than non-specialized dictionaries) would my current understanding of the field be much different. I think it would.

I'm starting a translation project of 《西国记法》written in 1595, and I'm going to be careful in my selection of dictionaries. I'm going to stick with only Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, starting with a modern one - 《现代汉语规范词典》on Pleco.

I was reading the intro to Pi Wei Lun, and thought it interesting that he used all sorts of quotes from Nei Jing to support his argument that the spleen and stomach were all-important.

It started me thinking that no text (that I can remember) has mentioned that if you stop breathing you will die . . .

Perhaps because issues dealing with breathing were considered the realm of qi gong practitioners, and not herbal physicians?

[UPDATE] A recent discussion with my taiji Shifu confirmed a hunch - the medicine I'm studying is more about treating disease (治病) than 'nourishing life' (养生). The latter is more a part of the daoist tradition.

Were there periods in Chinese history when the visual was not emphasized?

It is certainly a characteristic of modern medicine (a product of current society) that what is visible is real. Visualizing the disease is incredibly important in making a WM diagnosis.

In CM "the inside is known by observing the outside", and observing includes palpation, smelling, and asking in addition to visually observing - in other words, the visible aspect of disease is not emphasized.

So is this a product of Chinese culture?

(racing along here, do modern Chinese CM physicians emphasize the visible more than those in the past? Also, given that our reconstruction of practices of the past is done mainly from textual evidence, and is presented in reference to modern practices . . . how accurate can it be? Bleah...is it even worth thinking about, given that we can only imagine what it was like in the past? What is the value in trying to recreate past practices? . . . )

Learning in the clinic

Something I'd really like to ask clinicians:

How do you know if your treatment worked?

Blakemore thinking

Focus on the necessity of having language and culture bridges.

Language: There are many people whose mother tongue is Chinese, studied TCM, and can communicate in English fluently. There are very few people whose mother tongue is English, studied TCM, and can communicate fluently in Chinese.

Culture: There are few people with a Western cultural background who can communicate well enough in Chinese to explore the culture of Chinese medicine in modern China.

So, saying 'few' indicates that there is a need for more. What is the need? You need to be able to express this well.

A new (old) way of thinking.

I keep coming back to this:

TCM education is in fact teaching a completely new way of thinking.

It takes a long time to change the way one thinks.

And it is difficult to teach people to think in a new way.

But wait, isn't it teaching an old way of thinking?

Well yes, but the people learning it (including Chinese) are all modern people, who think in a modern way. What I mean is, everybody took biology and chemistry before learning CM. (that is a concrete, limited way of expressing what I mean)