Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States

Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States is an insightful and captivating ethnography of Chinese medicine practitioners in the San Francisco Bay area, one that reveals their socialization as students and experiences as clinicians into a world where East meets West perhaps more so than in any place in the United States. Religious studies scholar Emily S. Wu has written a masterful cultural interpretive or phenomenological examination of both Asian American and European American practitioners who have sought to adapt the psychic, spiritual, cultural, and environmental insights of an ancient medical tradition to a post-modern society where many people have sought meaningful alternatives or complements to Western biomedicine which all too still remains reductionist in its treatment of illness and the healing of the body politic. Her book makes an important contribution to the study of medical pluralism and complementary and alternative medical systems in American society. -- Hans Baer, University of Melbourne
Emily Wu’s Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States makes a key contribution to the growing body of literature on Chinese Medicine in the United States, with a focus on San Francisco. This highly readable work takes us through the world of the city’s practitioners, while deftly tracing the history of the medicine in California and the impact of such cultural factors as racial politics, steps taken to establish the medicine’s legitimacy, the impact of HIV/AIDS, and new developments like the Community Acupuncture movement. The transmission of the tradition in its different forms and branches, the fluctuating relationships with biomedicine, the fluid understandings of science, and practitioners’ different approaches to the spiritual dimension of human existence and self-cultivation practices combine to further enrich Wu’s discussion. An excellent addition to the field. -- Linda L. Barnes, Boston University