Chinese Medicine Student Clubs in Taipei, Taiwan

This thesis focuses on a communal form of transmission of Chinese medicine in contemporary Taiwan: Chinese medicine university student clubs. Offering fundamental Chinese medicine curricula to students and the interested public, the student clubs used to serve as a direct educational steppingstone towards licensed practice. Recent changes in medical education policy, however, made a university degree in Chinese medicine a requirement, thereby pushing informal ways of knowledge transmission into the realm of lay activity. Nevertheless, the clubs remain active and still serve as a community for people interested in Chinese medicine, including those wanting to pursue it professionally. Based on field research conducted in two such university clubs in Taipei in early 2018, this thesis first outlines the challenges and tensions faced and negotiated by those club members with professional ambitions. Not (yet) enrolled in “official” Chinese medicine programs at university but already deeply engaged in learning, they constitute a group of people rarely represented in academic literature, namely those just orienting themselves towards becoming Chinese medicine physicians. These processes of orientation and becoming are shaped by organizational, economic, and epistemological pressures and embedded in transnational movements, imaginaries, and regulatory regimes. Secondly, the thesis examines the function and position of the clubs in the changing landscape of Chinese medical education in Taiwan, as well as in the wider field of transmission of Chinese medicine. I argue that they foster continued interest in Chinese medicine in an environment that has favored biomedicine since the Japanese colonial era and that they, although through paths more winded than before, still contribute to the reproduction of professional Chinese medical expertise. In addition, they provide space for communal forms of healthcare. Lastly, they contribute to the maintenance of everyday healthcare competence in the wider public, or what Arthur Kleinman (1980) has called the “popular sector of healthcare.

InMD-X: Large Language Models for Internal Medicine Doctors

In this paper, we introduce InMD-X, a collection of multiple large language models specifically designed to cater to the unique characteristics and demands of Internal Medicine Doctors (IMD). InMD-X represents a groundbreaking development in natural language processing, offering a suite of language models fine-tuned for various aspects of the internal medicine field. These models encompass a wide range of medical sub-specialties, enabling IMDs to perform more efficient and accurate research, diagnosis, and documentation. InMD-X's versatility and adaptability make it a valuable tool for improving the healthcare industry, enhancing communication between healthcare professionals, and advancing medical research. Each model within InMD-X is meticulously tailored to address specific challenges faced by IMDs, ensuring the highest level of precision and comprehensiveness in clinical text analysis and decision support. This paper provides an overview of the design, development, and evaluation of InMD-X, showcasing its potential to revolutionize the way internal medicine practitioners interact with medical data and information. We present results from extensive testing, demonstrating the effectiveness and practical utility of InMD-X in real-world medical scenarios

Medical Utilization in the Context of Culture: Analyzing the Concepts, Benefits and Drawbacks of Sri Lankan Biomedical and Ayurvedic Healthcare

Sri Lanka is an island inhabited by a culture more than 5,000 years old. The primary medicine utilized by this culture in precolonial times is known as Ayurveda. During colonization, Sri Lanka was introduced to biomedicine and forced to negate Ayurvedic medicine. Throughout the years, rather than abandoning their indigenous medical practice, Sri Lanka incorporated biomedicine and Ayurvedic medicine into their medically plural society. Today, Sri Lankans utilized both medicines for different ailments, concerns and conditions. Utilizing a variety of anthropological methods and theories, this study gathered qualitative information from 39 Sri Lankan informants. These informants were recruited to find out the cultural dynamics and purposes of Ayurvedic medicine and biomedicine and the relationship between the two medical systems. The informants also provided valuable insight into the strength and weaknesses between the two medical systems along with explaining the concept of illness, dynamics of communication and whether the medical systems either cure or heal the patient. Informants suggested that Sri Lanka utilizes biomedicine for curative care to cure their patients while incorporating Ayurvedic medicine for preventative care to heal their patients. It appeared that the principle purpose of private biomedical clinics is to treat any non-emergency related conditions while government biomedical hospitals tend to treat emergency related conditions. Private and government Ayurvedic medicine appear to treat common ailments and conditions mostly related to soft tissue and preventative care. According to informants, it appears that biomedicine and Ayurvedic medicines have different benefits and drawbacks. However, these characteristics seem to support one another. If there is a medical area where biomedical care falls short in treating, Ayurvedic medicine tends to offer a solution to that shortcoming and vice versa. According to Sri Lankan informants, it appears that Sri Lanka’s effective healthcare has opportunities to improve and progress if biomedicine and Ayurvedic medicine function in a cooperative relationship rather than a competitive one

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a “Teaching Subject”: Lessons from the Medical Humanities and Simulation Pedagogy

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners

The Recovery of Healthcare: A case study of Javanese medical practices and related discussions about pluralism in healthcare

The use of 'traditional' medicine is a common phenomenon throughout Indonesia. In today’s Indonesian healthcare system 'traditional' and complementary medicine coexist with globalized biomedicine and even urban, educated households are still more likely to use 'traditional' than biomedical healthcare. This paper explores the fundamental differences between Western and Javanese understandings of health, illness and healing. It highlights first the Javanese relational perspective on healing, which involves resonance with the surrounding whole. It contrasts this with the entanglement of biomedical knowledge and economic interests, which is identified as a major problem of governmental healthcare services, as it enables overshadowing the medical objective of helping health-seeking persons with the objective of generating profit. Relationships with biomedical experts are described as shaped by monetary considerations, while rejecting non-biomedical treatment methods is suspected of being a way of protecting the interests of biomedical businesses. Based on these categorical and structural barriers between different medical traditions, the nationally structured and formally recognized system of healthcare is contrasted with a common informal, socially and culturally rooted way of navigating healing. Therefore, against the formal background of these conceptual differences, the paper highlights health seekers’ sensual experiences, embodied realities, and their common routines of tinkering and combining healthcare practices between conceptual differences. This provides glimpses into everyday informal cooperation between distinct medical traditions, which easily bridge categorical, structural and economic barriers.  Key words: Healthcare Bricolage; Indonesia; Jamu Medicine; Javanese Tradition Medical Degrowth; Medical Pluralism; Primary Healthcare; Traditional Knowledge; Traditional Medicine. &nbsp

‘Decolonising the Medical Curriculum‘: Humanising medicine through epistemic pluralism, cultural safety and critical consciousness

The Decolonising the Curriculum movement in higher education has been steadily gaining momentum, accelerated by recent global events calling for an appraisal of the intersecting barriers of discrimination that ethnic minorities can encounter. While the arts and humanities have been at the forefront of these efforts, medical education has been a ‘late starter’ to the initiative. In this article, we describe the pioneering efforts to decolonise the undergraduate medical curriculum at UCL Medical School (UCLMS), London, by a group of clinician educators and students, with the aim of training emerging doctors to treat diverse patient populations equitably and effectively. Throughout this process, students, faculty and members of the public acted as collaborative ‘agents of change’ in co-producing curricula, prompting the implementation of several changes in the UCLMS curriculum and rubric. Reflecting a shift from a diversity-oriented to a decolonial framework, we outline three scaffolding concepts to frame the process of decolonising the medical curriculum: epistemic pluralism, cultural safety and critical consciousness. While each of these reflect a critical area of power imbalance within medical education, the utility of this framework extends beyond this, and it may be applied to interrogate curricula in other health-related disciplines and the natural sciences. We suggest how the medical curriculum can privilege perspectives from different disciplines to challenge the hegemony of the biomedical outlook in contemporary medicine – and offer space to perspectives traditionally marginalised within a colonial framework. We anticipate that through this process of re-centring, medical students will begin to think more holistically, critically and reflexively about the intersectional inequalities within clinical settings, health systems and society at large, and contribute to humanising the practice of medicine for all parties involved

Traditional Chinese medicine physicians’ insights into inter-professional tensions between traditional Chinese medicine and biomedicine: a critical perspective

In Singapore, the institutional preference for biomedicine and the cultural importance of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have created tensions between the two medical systems and erected barriers to a more collaborative healthcare system. This study foregrounds TCM physicians’ voice to reveal ideological struggles and power imbalances that underlie the inter-professional tensions and accompanying marginalization of TCM. Through in-depth interviews with 22 TCM physicians in Singapore, this study reveals the incongruences in ideological underpinnings between biomedicine and TCM, reflected in their different worldviews and epistemological approaches to knowledge formation and evaluation. Power differentials between the two medical systems are manifest in TCM physicians’ inferior position in relation to their biomedical peers, the patients’ internalization of biomedical standards to question the TCM profession and their own interest in seeking TCM treatments, and the state’s limited support for TCM research, subsidies, and service provision in hospital settings. The results suggest that more open dialogue about the dichotomous framings of biomedicine and TCM is key to disrupting the mutual reinforcement of ideology and power, as well as to creating increased mutual understanding between the two medical systems

A REVIEW ON SCOPES, METHODS AND RATIONALE OF INTEGRATIVE APPROACH IN SIDDHA MEDICINE WITH BIOMEDICINE

In India, according to WHO 2018 statistics, there were 63% of death occurred due to Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), in which Cardiovascular diseases were leading cause of death 27%, followed by Cancer 9%, Chronic respiratory disease 11%, Diabetes 3% and other NCDs 13%. This indicates that NCDs needs to become a priority in controlling and preventing. Therefore, the only effective intervention may be at controlling and preventing NCDs disease is Integrative Medicine. Integrative Medicine is a medical practice synthesizing Traditional medicine and Biomedicine preventive measures and treatment interventions. Autonomy of patients may end in no benefit out of their ignorance to select between the treatment options available in a country like India where Seven Recognized medical systems are available as a platter. Siddha system of medicine is one of the traditional medicines of India, practiced in the southern part of the country. This study aims at providing Health care system under one roof, in order to save public money, time and health as an existing model as co-location in Tamil Nadu. This can be achieved through assessing feasible areas of integration in the Siddha system of medicine with biomedicine. So the study deals with the utilization of Siddha system of medicine, scientific validation of Siddha medicines, Siddha medicine research undertaken by biomedical practitioners and some government policies supporting mainstreaming of Siddha

Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences 2006 Annual Report: Addressing Health Challenges in Michigan

2006 annual report includes: Greetings from the Chair, Maryjean Schenk; Introducing New Faculty; Full-time affiliate and Voluntary Faculty; In Memoriam: John B. Waller, Jr.; Master of Public Health Program; Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Honors, Awards and Appointments; University Family Physicians; Family Medicine Residency; Occupational and Environmental Health; New Grant Highlights; External Funding; Highlights from 2006 Publications; Peer-reviewed Publications; Editorial and Peer-Review Activities; Undergraduate Medical Education Division; Behavioral Science; Presentations and Professional Meetings; Division of Clinical and Community Translational Research; Trends in Faculty Rank and Scholarship