How a contemporary healer works across Chinese, Buddhist, and mainstream medical worldviews

What is it about?

What happens when a healing community draws upon multiple medical models of health and the body, especially when these perspectives conflict? Focusing on a Chinese American community in the New York City area, I explain how they move among healing with qigong, acupuncture, fengshui and other Chinese medical arts to Buddhist conceptions of karmic causes/cures for disease, and also engage with mainstream medical assumptions of the body. Instead of translating Chinese or Buddhist medicine into mainstream medical terms, this group code-switches or uses multiple medical languages at the same time without placing mainstream medicine higher than other medical worldviews.

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Photo by Kimiya Sabbaghan on Unsplash

Photo by Kimiya Sabbaghan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Some researchers propose the idea of medical bilingualism as a way to with two or more medical languages. However, the translation is almost always in one direction: from a marginalized medical language into the mainstream model of so called "western" or biomedicine. This places mainstream medicine on a higher status, as if it is the one true or real medicine. Code-switching among multiple languages, like a speaker using Spanish, Chinese, and English in the same sentence, does not elevate any language as any more true or better able to capture reality than others. Hence, for this community, Chinese, Buddhist, and mainstream medicine are on equal footing.

Perspectives