The following is the second adapted excerpt of an upcoming article called “The Untold Story of Acupuncture.” It is scheduled to be published in December 2009 in Focus in Alternative and Complementary Therapies (FACT), a review journal that presents the evidence on alternative medicine in an analytical and impartial manner. This section argues that the current flurry of interest in acupuncture and Oriental Medicine stems predominantly out of postmodern opposition to Enlightenment rationalism, and bears witness to Orientalism and consumerism in contemporary medicine. ...
This unfounded belief seems to stem out of our collective amnesia about lancing and bloodletting, and the belief in the existence of pneuma, or other vitalist notions that have been part of European natural philosophy and medicine since the Greek Antiquity. Indeed, as a result of successive epistemological ruptures11 during the last five centuries, medicine in the West has gradually evolved from late medieval astromedicine and humoral pathology to the molecular medicine and cellular pathology of today. Therefore, fundamental notions that once underlined European medicine have gradually become so foreign to us that their Eastern counterparts now seem to be based on worldviews fundamentally different than ours. But in the eyes of many historians and epistemologists, they have always appeared as similar to ideas that prevailed in Pre-Enlightenment Europe, and based on which the Fasciculus Medicinae12 and other late medieval medical treatises were written.
These ideas continue to find an audience in todays’s post-Counterculture era due to the continued postmodern opposition to Enlightenment rationalism and the claim that modern science does not provide more access to the truth than any other fields of knowledge–that scientific discourse is mainly just another coherent “narrative” or “language-game” governed by a set of protocols and a special terminology.13,14 In this climate of incredulity toward “metanarratives” and universal knowledge, many nonscientific forms of knowledge have gained legitimacy and popularity as a result of the prevalence of postmodern culture, politics and economics. Many ancient, folkloric and traditional systems of medicine have thus appeared as compelling narratives, perceived by patients as legitimate and equivalent but opposite to the logical empiricism of modern science.
The persistence of such ideas is also due to what the late Edward Saïd (1935–2003) has called Orientalism. In a 1978 publication by the same name, Saïd convincingly argued that the idea that Eastern cultures have crucial characteristics directly and unequivocally opposite to the West is a Western construct that “exotices” the East while neglecting considerations of power. Saïd argued that the alleged distinction between Oriental and Occidental thought primarily derives from a set of scholarly and popular fantasies about Eastern civilizations, Classical Eras, Golden Ages, scriptures, works of art, philosophies and religions where mysticism is set against the rationalism and detachment of the West.15 Saïd also argued that this mythical Orient is a mere fiction that serves to represent the hidden desires of Western cultures, a mysterious “Other” onto which we project our fantasies.16 The pervasiveness of such projected fantasies about Eastern reactions to health and disease onto acupuncture and Chinese medicine, certainly confirms Saïd’s argument. The fictional character of this “Other” medicine can be further perceived in the indecisiveness of the professional associations and the regulatory agencies to refer to acupuncture and related modalities as “Chinese,” “Oriental,” “Asian” or “Eastern,” for these utterly broad “umbrella” categorizations are based on political correctness, and do not correspond to any geopolitical and historical reality other than a geographical and philosophical “orient”-ation.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=930
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