A conversation...
11 November 2020
Last week I spoke to a colleague. Well, speaking…
At first there was a conversation, but it quickly turned into a heated discussion.
It started with him asking me what I thought of the whole corona approach. Whether I could agree with the measures imposed on us by the Cabinet and the RIVM. And whether I would be vaccinated if the corona vaccine was released.
I tried to give a nuanced answer and explained that I understood the choices.
With the limited, but ever expanding, knowledge about the COVID-19 virus and the general regular medical view of these kinds of problems, I can follow the RIVM and also a cabinet that follows and implements the advice. However, in view of my knowledge and vision, I also have a number of reservations about both the vision on this serious viral infection and the approach.
But apparently you are not expected to be nuanced at the moment. You are either in favour of the RIVM policy or you are totally against it.
He wondered out loud how I could say something like that with my training in Chinese medicine. And, he added, you are also going to give a refresher course on the practical application of the Shang Han Lun in January. Notably on infectious diseases such as COVID-19.
I saw him getting angrier and more and more disappointed. He really expected something different from me. And now that he was getting on his feet anyway, he immediately made it bigger.
This was exactly what was going on: we were not heard and not taken seriously by mainstream medicine and health insurers and scientific researchers. “They should not be so condescending to Chinese medicine… to the whole alternative medical field… They should make the effort to ‘really’ listen to us so that they could understand what we had to offer in terms of health care.
I was surprised at his frustration. I really did not know him that way.
I agree with him that it would be very good if “they” bothered to talk to us.
“Really” have a real conversation.
Because I think we can certainly contribute something to solving many of today’s health problems, including the corona pandemic.
But for a “real” conversation you need two parties. Not only the listener, but also the speaker.
My experience is that there are more and more doctors and researchers in the medical world who want to listen, but we as speakers do not have the language to get the message across. If we want ‘they’ to understand us, we cannot expect ‘they’ to master our language and our paradigm first. However, we must first learn to communicate clearly and unambiguously. To convert a language from another culture and from another time into a language that is accessible and understandable to a Western culture in the 21st century, WITHOUT damaging the core of Chinese medicine as described in the classical texts.
Let us try to understand and translate the model of infectious diseases from the Shang Han Lun with today’s knowledge of the immune system and embryological and foetal development from systems biology.
My experience is that when I try to communicate in this way with people from the mainstream health field, I at least have the benevolence and usually even an interested listener.
It is almost the same willingness that I experience when I try to order a coffee in Swedish with my nodules instead of just starting in English…
