FACT??? (terminology)

[Guest guest]

Zev,

 

Agreed that CM describes a reality, and in this sense comprises " statements

of fact " . And I agree with your emphasis, as, in Unschuld's sense, all too

often statements (in the West) as to the nature of CM are more " creative "

than based in an accurate understanding of tradition(s).

 

The phrase reminded me of the name of a book by Bob Flaws. which I bought

on impulse, but then found disappointing, as it struck me as stylistically

bordering on the dogmatic. (It reminded me of catechisms, in my early,

Catholic school education. For those not familiar which that context,

another example would be Chairman Mao's little Red Book during the Cultural

Revolution.)

 

For different reasons, however, the word 'fact' makes me uncomfortable in

our context here, in the sense that it is so closely associated with the

notion of " evidence-based " , as used often in the expressing viewpoints that

dismiss our entire field as fictitious. Paul Unschuld, who at times

unabashedly expresses a bias along positivistic lines (though he is far

from a wholesale dismissal of CM), uses the notion of " fact " - or rather

the absence thereof -- to somewhat disparagingly dismiss various tenets of

CM (in Chapter 5 of the NeiJing-SuWen book). (However, in the course of the

workshop in Northern California last summer, he also observed that

ultimately all knowledge systems, including Western science and medicine,

are, deep down, just shared belief systems.)

 

So I look around for a more appropriate terminology, but can't readily

settle on a completely satisfying substitute.

 

As Ted Kaptchuk points out (a couple of times, in recent papers coming out

of his work in methodology), that in all (experimental) science, the data

itself (often called the " facts " ) doesn't amount to much of anything in the

absence of interpretation. Interpretation is, in fact, the meat of what

people usually understand as " facts " . (And very often, lurking around

beneath the surface of interpretation is the phenomenon called bias.)

 

So, in this sense, concepts of CM are in the same ballpark as the common

understanding of " facts " : they have an empirical basis, and represent an

interpretation, a description of reality, if at times more metaphorical

than " objective " in style.

 

For instance, " signification " (in the Bensky-Scheid sense) could be said to

be, from our perspective, a fundamental fact in the practice CM, but is

unlikely to admitted as " evidence-based " , hence valid, in (current)

scientific thinking. But a focus in Kaptchuk's work, as I understand it,

relates to treating science as a process involving continual self-criticism

and refinement of methodology. He and his colleagues are in fact attempting

to push the envelope of current scientific (experimental medical)

methodology (including the understanding of key concepts such as bias and

the placebo effect) to more adequately address medical phenomena as

cognitively framed in Chinese medicine.