Robert Cran Clinic blog

This blog is intended to be a gradually expanding, helpful resource for Patients of Chinese medicine.

Patients of Chinese medicine experience information gaps in two aspects:

• Patients who have not been brought up in Chinese cultural territories have accordingly not grown up with the conceptual and lexical background that is required to understand Chinese medicine on its own terms.  On the other hand Patients in this category do have a huge database of conceptual and lexical background of modern, industrial medicine.  There is an understandable desire for the easiest solution:  to interpret Chinese medicine concepts in terms of modern, industrial medicine.  Unfortunately this is impossible:  the two languages and the concepts they deal with are so completely different that any correspondences only serve to produce even more misunderstanding.
• Information about Chinese medicine in its own terms is tantamount to zero in internet sources.  There is a fundamental and virtually unavoidable reason for this:  Chinese medicine is by definition individualised and hence does not produce repeatable generalisations about diseases, but rather produces particularisations about them in the context of individual and mutually distinct occurrences.  Therefore to generate meaningful discussion or information about Patients' actual diseases requires an advanced level of understanding of Chinese medicine on the part of the participants; a beginner's vocabulary simply produces more questions and more misunderstanding than it prevents.  There is an understandable desire to describe Chinese medicine and its actions in modern, industrial medicine terms.  Unfortunately this does not produce an understanding of Chinese medicine; it merely serves to proliferate habituation to the use of modern, industrial conceptuality on the one hand, and misconception about Chinese medicine in its own, real terms, on the other hand.

This blog and its related websites cannot possibly be expected to redress this imbalance, due to the inherent nature of the obstacles.  However, by discussing individual issues in terms of Chinese medicine on its own terms, and with the understanding that Patients must learn to accept the reality of a new language to be painstakingly acquired, these sites may serve to help those willing to make the personal efforts towards that conceptual change and growth indispensible for a true understanding of and interface with this inestimably mature, 2nd largest medical system in the world.