More than language

[Guest guest]

Jim and all,

 

Tardy reply.

 

> For those less self-motivated or less able to learn Chinese (an

[ . . .]

> considering the limited time avaiable.

 

>From the perspective of a merchant, I would look at the problem from the

outside-in, rather than from the inside-out.

 

I think we need to make peace with the fact that we are preparing people to

earn their living in a medical delivery system that is so deeply rooted in our

economies that our future as a profession, perhaps even our survival as a

profession, depends on having both a sufficient and positive medical and

economic impact.

 

If we cannot prepare the " average college graduate " to leave our schools

equipped to provide a known population with enough cost-justified therapy

to pay their student loans, buy an " average " house, and send their 2.25

average kids to college, we will not become a self-governing profession

because we will lack the resources necessary to govern access to and

delivery of CM.

 

Thus, while I agree that this takes more than just Chinese language, I think

that the answer to what more it takes lays in listening to the peoples to

whom we offer our services and preparing our graduates to meet their

needs. To me this means a greater concentration on who our patient's are

and what they want both in terms of the practice development issues

Honora Wolf has addressed but also in designing curriculum to provide the

necessary therapeutic foundation and experience.

 

Although I don't think that schooling must be only " job training " and I

certainly feel that were graduates provided a solid knowledge of Chinese

cultural topics they would have a clearer understanding of their skills and

how to use them, we also need to know what the surrounding culture wants

from us and to teach graduates to efficiently provide it. We could

accomplish this except that we continue to view CM as an " alternative " to

biomedicine, rather than as a service we are offering our patients justified

by its own results.

 

Consider, for example, the response to the PRC's integrated medicine.

Because we have allowed the discussion of integrated medicine to be

dominated by issues of " purity " - a notion that depends on seeing CM as an

alternative to biomedicine - we have failed to note that it is the PRC's road

map for the participation of CM physicians in a biomedically-dominated

medico-economic system. Their system is not ours, and we will not do what

they do, but we can certainly look at it as an idea of how to work within our

own medical economies.

 

> If publishers got a better ROI because more texts were used in

> classes and reading and research skills were developed earlier, they could

> include the Chinese characters in each translation and in that way help

> develop an intellectual environment where the Chinese characters

> themselves would be more immediate, accessible, and influential.

 

I don't think that the problem is publisher's return on investment. If you

look at the cost of pre-production, production and distribution of texts

commonly used in the CM schools, the percentage return is likely higher

than that for biomedical texts because the pre-production costs are so much

lower. The relative profit numbers are smaller because the market is

smaller not because the return is deficient. We would not be seeing the

largest publishers in the world jumping-in if a bunch of MBA's didn't think

there was a useful return.

 

I think the problem is that the field generally does not believe that the

explicit relationship of Chinese to English is important, otherwise we would

not have lecture materials or textbooks that are neither fully documented or

glossed. All anyone would need to say is that to be acceptable as a CM

textbook a work must meet generally accepted peer review standards and

publishers would see investment in the textbook market in an entirely

different light because the limits to competition would be resolved.

 

Bob

 

bob Paradigm Publications

www.paradigm-pubs.com 44 Linden Street

Robert L. Felt Brookline MA 02445

617-738-4664

 

 

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