Guest Editorial by Dan Bensky from The Magazine of the Anglo-Dutch Institute for Oriental Medicine 1 Winter 1996

Elsewhere in this newsletter are reports regarding the pressures and criticisms the Oriental medical world is facing from outside. These are real and, in part, due to our continued successes. However, focusing too much on them could distract us from dealing with more pressing problems that face our community.

It is the internal conflicts and prejudices that most concern me. More and more it seems that the diversity that should be our main strength is being undermined. It would be very strange for people in a profession such as ours to work at cutting themselves off from important and useful aspects of our tradition. Yet everywhere I see more and more evidence that this is exactly what is happening.

One aspect of this trend is a self-centered focus on territory or power. Some parts of the Oriental medical community put much more energy and resources into attempting to control who learns Oriental medicine than in learning it themselves. On the one hand, this arises from a basic error: forgetting that we do not own Oriental medicine; it owns us. Our task is to learn as much as we can, and to do the best job we can, of presenting Oriental medicine and using it to treat patients. What others do is of such secondary importance that it should hardly impinge on our consciousness.

This battle over turf is just one way in which the alternative medical community acts as a crazy-house mirror to the conventional medical world, reflecting the latter's errors and hypocrisy in relatively bizarre ways. We wail and complain that the conventional medical world is exclusionary and narrow-minded. We decry their attitude that disparages or ignores anything that does not fit the procrustean bed of their knowledge. We demand to be accepted and allowed to do our work. Yet, we require that we be allowed to be exclusionary and narrow-minded ourselves; that only we be allowed to do this work, and that it must be done our way.

Even more disturbing to me is an outgrowth of this trend, manifesting in the various groups (dare I say factions?) in Oriental medicine denigrating and ignoring the contributions and possibilities of other groups. Often this bias appears along ethnic lines, which brings up many disturbing questions. Instead of a dispassionate interest in and openness to the contributions that all groups can make, we discount and disparage each other.

Examples are manifold. Some schools in the West refuse to take anything from modern China seriously, invoking antisinitic attitudes or Orientalism, sometimes to the point of refusing to have any Chinese teachers. Many practitioners in China are so mind-fogged by their ethnocentrism that they find it impossible to even take note of any of the developments made to Oriental medicine in the West. Some Japanese practitioners cling to nationalistic rhetoric about their particular forms of Oriental medicine, and become so narrow-minded that they believe the practice of yoga by acupuncturists is criminal. The list goes on and on.

I find this not only reprehensible from a moral perspective, but downright puzzling as a practitioner. Clinically, I need all the help that I can get. I have learned many valuable lessons from teachers and colleagues from China, Japan, Korea, Europe, and America. It is hard for me to imagine how limited my understanding would be if I had made a decision to cut myself off from any of these groups. I believe strongly that my patients have also benefited from the teachings and ideas that these various people have shared with me. In addition, studying with a variety of teachers helps us understand the filters and cultural baggage that each of us carries around.

The practice of Oriental medicine should be an expansive process, one that opens up possibilities both for patients and practitioners. Neither we nor our patients can afford to have it otherwise. If we become fossilized, if we spend more time closing ourselves off from the tradition than connecting with it, if our own confidence level dips so low that we need to disparage our colleagues before we even understand what they are saying, then it will take very little outside pressure to collapse our community and cause us to lose our foothold in the healthcare systems of the West.