Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine [Hardcover]

Alternative medicine is a fifty billion dollar per year industry. But is it all nonsense? The Whole Story rounds up the latest evidence on the placebo effect, the randomized control trial, personalized genetic medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy and more. It reaches a provocative conclusion: alternative therapies' whole-body approach might be just what medicine really needs right now to help crack the tough, chronic conditions seemingly untouched by the revolutions of surgery, antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccines and molecular biology.Introduction: Cultural Specificity and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Expert Knowledge Sources for the Study of 'Medical Orientalism' Overview Understanding the Needle: Tool, Technique and Techne PART 1: EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERTISE: EARLY BRITISH RESPONSES TO CHINESE MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY The Macartney Mission: Commerce and Discovery Encountering Illness: Lay Expectations of Chinese Medicine Cultural Specificity and Diagnostic Consensus The Professional Opinion: Prepared for Failure Chinese Stories: Narratives of Contention and Narratives of Change The Power of the Pulse: An Early Response to Chinese Diagnostics Through the Eye of the Needle: Medical Politics and the Gillan Report Anderson and Eades: Perceptions of China Below the Salt Medicine's Mirror PART 2: THE NEEDLE TRANSFIXED: TEN RHYNE, KAEMPFER AND THE EUROPEAN GAZE Trade Winds: Wilhelm Ten Rhyne and the Cartography of the Needle Engelbert Kaempfer: Observation and Acupuncture Strangely Familiar: Western Responses to Moxibustion Curiosity Pricked: Lay Responses in France and Britain Eyeing the Needle: Medical Interpretations of Acupuncture Galvanizing The Needle PART 3: SHARPENING THE NEEDLE: BRITISH INTERPRETATIONS OF ACUPUNCTURE, 1802-30 Chinese Whispers: Lay Accounts of Chinese Medicine, 1810-40 Acupuncture in the Medical Periodicals, 1810-22 'For Which it is Most Particularly Recommended': James Churchill and the Singular Needle Interpretive Responses to A Trelc(