This is a talk about “piracy,” the unauthorized use of intellectual property. What brought this about is an incident where someone used the field's dis

Acupedia

I originally planned this post as review of the A.A.A.O.M. Portland Conference term meetings and seminars with a concentration on the announcement of "Acupedia," a wikipedia-style web site that will present different term lists for comparison. I labeled the post "The End of the Term Debate" to emphasize that the presence of such a tool meant the end of two ideas that have long retarded the development of CM in the English-speaking world; that is, the notion that translation standards would lead to some never-defined but supposedly horrid outcome and the idea that terminology was about the selection of words rather than the preservation of ideas.

There has been considerable discussion and an unusual amount of press coverage covering the German studies of acupuncture and their conclusions. This links to an example article. This discussion is a good example of how long it takes for the medical establishment to pay attention to work done on acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Stephen Birch covered this issue in his Ph.D. thesis at Exeter University, and in Understanding Acupuncture, a text that has been used in medical schools for nearly a decade.

Terminology in Chinese Medicine: A Critique of the WHO term list

N. Herman Oving, translator of Chinese medical literature

Abstract

This paper shows severe flaws in the terminology as proposed by the document WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region. After an overview of general principles applied in terminology, the methodology behind the WHO list is discussed, illustrated by an analysis of several terms and definitions.

Part Four: The Cost of Chaos

This is the last blog post in the "Term Chaos is Just Chaos" series, the previous posts are:

Part 1: Where the Infringement Hides

Part 2: Not Just a Matter of Words

Part 3: Standards Are Not Shallow

Those who have read the "Guided Tour to the Term Debate" essay on this site, understand that I see term chaos as just the latest step in a twenty-plus year attempt to justify paraphrase and simplification as the primary strategy for educating clinicians in the English-speaking world. The earliest assertion was that Chinese medicine had no terminology, an idea that I feel derived from a lay view of Chinese medical language and a certain embarrassment about Chinese medical ideas that expresses itself in the urge to biomedicalize and de-moralize. Later, as Wiseman and others consistently refuted this notion, anti-consistency arguments migrated, arriving today at "term chaos," which is itself a euphemism for an undocumented plurality that is supposed to be good, despite the lack of any orderly plan for how students are to be taught.

Part Three: Standards Are Not Shallow

At the A.A.O.M. nomenclature meeting Dr. Bensky and his colleagues made some very dramatic assertions. One of these was the assertion that standards are a detriment to seeking the "depth" of meaning in Chinese concepts. Notably, Dr. Bensky failed to describe "depth" in any understandable or practical, way. This is very much like his declaration that the long-standing consensual principals of translation Marnae Ergil described are "wrong." We're to take his word for it. Let's not do that. Let's think for ourselves.

"Language serves as a link between humans and the world: once this link is broken or lost, people have as good as lost their control over the world.

I have been threatening to do this for a while now. Here it is.

The innumerable, often-forwarded emails and list service postings discussing the FDA Guidance on complementary and alternative medical products have slowed down, perhaps reaching a saturation