Traditional Medical Systems In East Asia

Traditional East Asian healthcare systems have moved rapidly from the fringes of healthcare systems in the West towards the centre over the past 50 years. This change of status for traditional medicines presents their practitioners with both opportunities and challenges as the focus shifts from one of opposition towards one of integration into biomedically dominated healthcare systems. Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare examines the opportunities and challenges of integrating East Asian medicine into Western healthcare systems from an interdisciplinary perspective. Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson bring together contributions from acknowledged experts from a number of different disciplines - including clinical researchers, Chinese Medicine practitioners, historians, medical anthropologists, experts in the social studies of science, technology and medicine - to examine and debate the impact of the evidence-based medicine movement on the ongoing modernization of East Asian medicines. The book considers the following questions: •What are the values, goals and ethics implicit within traditional East Asian medical practices? • What claims to effectiveness and safety are made by East Asian medical practices? •What is at stake in subjecting these medical practices to biomedical models of evaluation? • What constitutes best practice? How is it to be defined and measured? • What are the ideologies and politics behind the process of integration of East Asian medical practices into modern health care systems? • What can we learn from a variety of models of integration into contemporary healthcare?

This unique book provides a comprehensive picture of the vivid kaleidoscope of traditional medicine in Asia presented by 34 eminent authors from 15 countries belonging to the different systems like Ayurveda and Chinese Traditional Medicine. Important emerging areas such as harmonization of the traditional systems with modern medicine and the growing role of these systems in the health care structure of countries are also dealt with. Legislation and regulation of these systems and practitioners, an area of growing concern, the need for good preclinical toxicology studies and scientific clinical evaluation of the products and medicinal plants used for therapy are exhaustingly dealt with. The vital issue of protection of traditional systems of medicine and patenting of medicinal plants is discussed in detail. The book is replete with suggestions, and ideas aimed at making traditional systems more effectively, and more widely used for health care. The book also covers the prevailing situation regarding the use and other aspects of traditional medicine in the 10 Member countries of the South-East Asia Region of the World Health Organization.

This book analyses the process of modernization of health and healing practices, and documents in detail the current trend among people who use both traditional and modern medicine. It has two unique and important features. One is the focus - five nations in Asia (China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) which are at different stages of social and economic development, are studied and compared, providing a current and detailed picture of the combination of traditional and modern ways of healing. The second unique feature is that each chapter is written by scholars who not only have the advantage of firsthand knowledge of the situation in their respective countries but also bring into their analyses their extensive research experience int he areas of medical sociology and medical history. Moreover, as a book written in English, it offers valuable up-to-date information on the Chinese, Japanese and Thai health care systems, which is usually not accessible to readers unfamiliar with these languages.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

"An excellent description and analysis of East Asian medicine ... Based on fieldwork conducted in Japan during 1973 and 1974, which involved the use of a variecy of participant-observer techniques, as well as extensive reading in primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English, Lock's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important dimension of life in Japan. . . In well-written chapters dealing with the philosophical foundations and historical development of East Asian medicine, Japanese attitudes regarding health, illness, and the human body, detailed description of kanpo clinics, herbal pharmacies, acupuncture and moxibustion clinics, shiatsu and anma clinics, East Asian medical schools as well as the interactions between various providers and patients (customers), Lock develops the cultural thesis ... In the process, she provides information on things most visitors to Japan have seen, heard, felt, and smelled but rarely understood."-Journal of Asian Studies "Breaks important new ground . . Lock discusses concrete medical practice and its cultural significance in general. ... rich in comparisons, engrossing to read, and analytically penetrating .... an important and absorbing book. It is an engaging account of how at least some Japanese people respond to universal problems. Most readers will obtain from it their first clear impression of what East Asian medicine actually is and does."-Journal of Japanese Studies "Of considerable significance for comparative cross-cultural studies of medicine, of which this is the best account for a Japanese setting that we now possess." --Monumenta Nipponica "Both Japan specialists and medical anthropologists will be stimulated, challenged, and engaged by this book.' --Medical Anthropology Newsletter

"The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China)--and the recent reforms to them provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing countries. All five systems have managed to keep a check on health spending despite their different approaches to financing and delivery. These differences are reflected in the progressivity of health finance, but the precise degree of progressivity of individual sources and the extent to which households are vulnerable to catastrophic health payments depend too on the design features of the system-the height of any ceilings on social insurance contributions, the fraction of health spending covered by the benefit package, the extent to which the poor face reduced copayments, whether there are caps on copayments, and so on. On the delivery side, too, Japan and the Tigers offer some interesting lessons. Singapore's experience with corporatizing public hospitals-rapid cost and price inflation, a race for the best technology, and so on-shows the difficulties of corporatization. Korea's experience with a narrow benefit package shows the danger of providers shifting demand from insured services with regulated prices to uninsured services with unregulated prices. Japan, in its approach to rate-setting for insured services, has managed to combine careful cost control with fine-tuning of profit margins on different types of care. Experiences with diagnosis-related groups in Korea and Taiwan (China) point to cost-savings but also to possible knock-on effects on service volume and total health spending. Korea and Taiwan (China) both offer important lessons for the separation of prescribing and dispensing, including the risks of compensation costs outweighing the cost savings caused by more "rational" prescribing, and cost-savings never being realized because of other concessions to providers, such as allowing them to have onsite pharmacists. "--World Bank web site.

Health patterns in Southeast Asia have changed profoundly over the past century. In that period, epidemic and chronic diseases, environmental transformations, and international health institutions have created new connections within the region and the increased interdependence of Southeast Asia with China and India. In this volume leading scholars provide a new approach to the history of health in Southeast Asia. Framed by a series of synoptic pieces on the "Landscapes of Health" in Southeast Asia in 1914, 1950, and 2014 the essays interweave local, national, and regional perspectives. They range from studies of long-term processes such as changing epidemics, mortality and aging, and environmental history to detailed accounts of particular episodes: the global cholera epidemic and the hajj, the influenza epidemic of 1918, WWII, and natural disasters. The writers also examine state policy on healthcare and the influence of organizations, from NGOs such as the China Medical Board and the Rockefeller Foundation to grassroots organizations in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.