Chinese vs. Western Medicine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/opinion/chinese-vs-western-medicine.html

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To the Editor:

“An Expert on Chinese Medicine, but No New Age Healer” (Saturday Profile, Sept. 24) is acute and thoughtful. Dr. Paul U. Unschuld’s juxtaposition of “rigor” and New Age puffery is salutary, but “Chinese pragmatism” hides a few things.

Mao Zedong called for “walking on two legs,” meaning not being one-sided. As Dr. Unschuld scorned herbs and acupuncture for his own bilateral lung embolism, Mao mixed praise for Chinese medicine with hardheaded preference for Western medical science on his own body.

Like Mao, the New York Times columnist James Reston adopted pragmatism, which isn’t very different in China from America. For his appendix surgery in Beijing in 1971, the anesthetic was a standard injection of Xylocain and Benzocain.Mr. Reston used acupuncture only for lingering pain afterward.

Mao said Chinese medicine was one of China’s three great contributions to world civilization (together with the game of mah-jongg and the novel “Dream of the Red Chamber”), but his doctor, Li Zhisui, reports that he preferred Western drugs and surgery.

In China and elsewhere, I have found acupuncture good for migraine and pointless for hip arthritis.

Dr. Unschuld believes that medicine and politics are similar: “You don’t blame others, you blame yourself. What did I do wrong? What made me vulnerable? What can I do against it?”

This message may touch America’s own politics in 2016.

ROSS TERRILL

Cambridge, Mass.

The writer, a research associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, is the author of “Mao,” “The New Chinese Empire” and other books about China.