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Roundtable: Figuring Out and Reconfiguring Traditional and Modern Uses of Asian Medicine
Roundtable Presenters: Ted Kaptschuk, Harvard Medical School; Eric Jacobson, Harvard Medical School; Alejandro Chaoul, M.D. Anderson Cancer Institute, Houston; Juhn Ahn, University of Toronto; Ivette Vargas,Austin College
Asian
medicine has caught the attention of the media and public worldwide representing
a strong wave within Western tradition of healthcare outside the castles of
“mainstream” medicine. In Asia itself, encounters with modernity and Western
medicine have altered how Asians themselves think about their environment, their
health, and their religious traditions. Religious ideas like spirit possession
or environmental hindrances are reconfigured or left aside to accommodate modern
cultural or scientific ideas. Often there is a discrepancy between traditional
ways of diagnosing and healing and their modern
counterparts. The presenters from across disciplines address the traditional and
modern uses of Asian medicine (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Tibetan) and what
is meant by “Asian Medicine”. Linda Barnes examines the presence of Chinese
medicine and healing in the U.S.; Alejandro Chaoul addresses research on
Tibetan yoga and Hatha yoga studies applied to women with breast cancer, as part
of the M.D. Anderson program on integrative medicine; Ivette Vargas explores the
role of klu nad and gdon nad (hindering obstacles or demon diseases) in the
Asian medical and environmental landscape in Tibetan communities; Juhn Ahn
examines Japanese medicine and the interpretation of illness and healing in the
practice of silent illumination zen and the letters Embossed Teakettle (Oradegama);
Eric Jacobson addresses the complexities behind FDA approval for clinical trials
of Tibetan medicine; and Ted Kaptchuk addresses the shifting contemporary
western medical landscape that has incorporated Asian medicine as part of the
market economy and the responses of the scientific and the scholarly community
to this shift.