Now Writing for the Public

[Guest guest]

Marne,

 

Your presentation is as yet the most explicit (and heart felt) statement I've seen of how CM education must grow in America. CM itself is so powerful to the Western mind in part because of China's history of literary recordings and of it's historical requirements of its own citizens to be scholarly. The cultural training in China is that the scholar occupies the highest rung of the cultural ladder, and even the farmer has more prestige than the merchant. Here in America, CM education takes its cue from the other end of the ladder. No?

 

From what I've seen, CM clinical efficacy represents for many a Westerner their first experience of Chinese culture. Then if such an individual is also well educated and has imbibed a long Western literature in some academic field, they will (like me) get very quiet and amazed when they look into the literature of the medicine that worked so well on their bodies. As a Western scientist (and before that a philosophy student), I've spent many library hours from Cornell University, to U. C. San Francisco to University of Texas (depending on my locale) researching papers, researching undergraduate and graduate theses, writing NSF grants, and trying to keep up with the literature of my field for graduate seminars and finally as a faculty member for 17 years. In an earlier post I brought up your very point, Marnae, in an oblique sort of way. I wondered if there was enough English literature to support a CM masters degree much less a CM doctorate.

 

I assumed back in the 1980s that my couple of years of Chinese language study was completely inadequate for studying Chinese medicine, so I never entered CM school as a student. Instead I went on to graduate school in Western sciences. What you've just stated finally supports my feelings that without fluency in Chinese, TCM school was/is a vocational institution and not an academic one. I'm assuming that the proposed doctorate will in fact include Chinese fluency as a basic requirement. It seems to me some sort of a fool's fantasy to get a doctorate in an area of endeavor where you can't read the historical literature much less the current clinical and academic literature. Where will your bibliography come from? To whom will you speak and from whom will you quote?

 

You and Ken both correctly state the case, I believe, that a rich and lively ongoing literature in any language is the basis of professional evolution in any realm of basic science or clinical science.

 

And now, excuse me, I have to write a syllabus for the summer session. ;-)

 

Emmanuel Segmen

 

-

Marnae Ergil

Tuesday, June 10, 2003 6:33 PM

Re: Re: San qi, Writing for the Public

Ken, Bob etc.Like Ken, I agree with most of Bob's recent post. However, as you say, there is a dearth of writing in this field. Unfortunately, I believe that the reason for this goes back to the schools, again! I recently (no longer) worked at a school that had a Master's thesis requirement. There were several problems with the requirement: First, the school did not support the faculty in giving guidance to the students nor did the school support the process of learning to write. At traditional academic institutions, one part of a full-time faculty load is being a thesis advisor - in exchange, faculty teach one or two classes per term. At most of our schools, if there are full-time faculty, they teach 3 - 5 classes per term, have an administrative responsibility and are also expected to mentor students. This ends up being an almost impossible task. And so, unfortunatly, the mentoring of individual student work often gets put to the side. As a full-time faculty who had some writing experience and an advanced degree from a traditional academic institution, I found myself mentoring between 6 - 10 students per semester. Because the program did not support the thesis process for the students, many of them had never even written a 10 page research paper, much less a 30 - 50 page thesis (and these were not clinically based but literature based). I often spent more of my time simply correcting spelling and grammatical problems than I did working with the content of the thesis. From my perspective, a Master's thesis should generate several publishable articles. Very few of the theses that I read were up to the standard of publication and, again, because the school did not support the process I was unable to give the time to the students to help them to achieve that - and so, the theses sit in the school library and never get looked at or worked on again. I relate this experience because it is a problem for this field. Our students are not trained to write well and as a result, do not write after completing their education. I recently had a conversation with a colleague who actually did write a good thesis and suggested to her that she consider publication. She was shocked that this might even be a possibility. The sense that we are training clinicians only seems to pervade our profession when in fact we should be training individuals who are clinicians but who also can think and reason and write and express themselves in public. It takes a certain amount of ego to be willing to put yourself out there in a publication and to deal with the critique that comes from that. Here we are back to authority and ownership - many of our students and professionals do not feel a sense of ownership of their medicine and so do not write. In traditional academia and in medicine, writing is how we communicate what we are doing with our colleagues - it is a conversation over many years that allows the participants to grow from the critiques and to mature their ideas. I believe that as educators we need to help our students to develop this way of thinking rather than being afraid to say something publicly. I am always encouraging students to read and write - papers, case studies, theoretical treatises, just random thoughts. I hope that at some point our schools mature to the point where the process of working with individual students and the time that that requires is recognized as a value to the institution and is recompensed appropriately. Otherwise, those of us who do it anyway start to get burned out. Marnae

[Guest guest]

For some reason, I didn't receive either Marnae's or Bob Flaws

afternoon postings, just Marnae's response to Bob and Emmanuel's

response to another post by Marnae. What gives?

 

 

On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 07:53 PM, Emmanuel Segmen wrote:

 

> Marne,

>  

> Your presentation is as yet the most explicit (and heart felt)

> statement I've seen of how CM education must grow in America.  CM

> itself is so powerful to the Western mind in part because of China's

> history of literary recordings and of it's historical requirements of

> its own citizens to be scholarly.   The cultural training in China is

> that the scholar occupies the highest rung of the cultural ladder, and

> even the farmer has more prestige than the merchant.  Here in

> America, CM education takes its cue from the other end of the ladder. 

> No?

>  

 

Well put Bob -

 

Marnae

 

At 04:13 PM 6/10/2003 +0000, you wrote:

 

Phil,

 

There are four possible causes of bleeding in CM:

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 6/10/03 10:55:47 PM, susegmen writes:

 

 

I'm assuming that the proposed doctorate will in fact include Chinese fluency as a basic requirement.  It seems to me some sort of a fool's fantasy to get a doctorate in an area of endeavor where you can't read the historical literature much less the current clinical and academic literature.

 

 

While I agree that this may be the case in developing PhD level professors for a number of the courses in a clinical doctorate program, I do not think language proficiency is a necessary part of understanding a medical perspective, be it Chinese or English. I do see that many, if not most Conventional medical schools worldwide require some English language ability, however, so perhaps basic medical terminology type training might be needed.

David Molony

[Guest guest]

I cannot see the logic of your point here, David. If the bulk of the

professional literature is in another language (Chinese), how can a

health professional have access to that literature without learning how

to read it? Not requiring medical Chinese in a doctorate program will

cripple the growth of the profession, because of the length of time in

developing credible translated material. If we are going to increase

access to biomedical training in the doctorate, we also need to

increase access to Chinese medical training as well. Much of the

advanced material has not been translated yet.

 

 

On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 11:00 AM, acuman1 wrote:

 

> While I agree that this may be the case in developing PhD level

> professors for a number of the courses in a clinical doctorate

> program, I do not think language proficiency is a necessary part of

> understanding a medical perspective, be it Chinese or English. I do

> see that many, if not most Conventional medical schools worldwide

> require some English language ability, however, so perhaps basic

> medical terminology type training might be needed.

> David Molony