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Part of
Controversies in the Contemporary World
Edited by Adriano Fabris and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 15] 2019
► pp. 105–124

Chapter 6
Trajectories and challenges of translating traditional Chinese medicine

The paper focuses on technoscientific translation of Chinese materia medica and acupuncture therapy, and the discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion that charactise the related boundary-work. Examples from books by Joseph Needham, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst show that the prior attitude towards the medical mertis of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) informs decisions on ranking different types of evidence, and even where evidence is shared, they can be framed differently (emphasis framing) to support endorsement or rejection of TCM. The trajectories of some translated herbal remedies (artemisinin, changsan, mahuang) of TCM show that the uptake in institutionalized biomedicine could benefit from the medical knowledge of TCM, and that not enough trust in TCM can be epistemically detrimental or ethically objectionable. Revisiting a landmark publication linking fMRI and acupuncture-research and the ensuing retraction suggests that some of the characteristic strategies employed in boundary work around TCM can hinder the scientific understanding of TCM. The cases studied give credence to the position that TCM by now is both inside and outside science as fruitful research can provide partial maps of TCM without full translation, and that demarcating TCM by framing it as fringe science is not a reasonable option.

Keywords: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), acupuncture, materia medica , boundary work, scientific controversies, technoscience, artemisinin, fMRI, sham needling
Article outline
  • 1.Translation of TCM to Western medical and scientific thinking
    • 1.1Epistemic control & the issue of trust in quality of TCM
    • 1.2Argumentative strategies of inclusion and exclusion
  • 2.Trajectories of translation
    • 2.1Patterns of institutional uptake of TCM materia medica
      • 2.1.1Qinghao – The extraction of the anti-malarial artemisinin
      • 2.1.2Changsan – The pride of Chinese (as opposed to Western) doctors
      • 2.1.3Ma huang – From fast translation and overexploitation to ban
    • 2.2The dynamics of TCM-bound technoscience
      • 2.2.1An early hybrid of acupuncture and fMRI imaging
      • 2.2.2Reinventing yin-yang categories for PNAS
      • 2.2.3Hybrids with limited life-expectancy
  • 3.Closure-landscape of a complex controversy with multiple core-sets
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Published online: 7 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.15.07zem
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