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What is the Council of Oriental
Medical Publishers and why does Paradigm support their efforts?
C.O.M.P., the Council of Oriental Medical Publishers, is an
informal
group of writers and publishers who accept the importance of labeling
the sources of information in books, articles and multimedia products
that make claims about acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine,
massage therapy, and the other healing traditions of East Asia.
Put bluntly -- and over simply -- there are two schools of thought
about Oriental medicine. One school believes that T.C.M. can
and should be explained by practitioners for whom personal clinical
experience is the unique or primary source of understanding. In
reality this means that they believe Chinese medicine is conceptually
small enough that it can be transmitted by individuals without refernce
to a publically available Chinese medical dictionary in English.
In general, people who write or publish from this perspective do
not provide C.O.M.P. labels on their books, do not reference a source
of definitions beyond the context in which they are used, and provide
relatively small glossaries with the books they write or publish.
Our editorial policies are founded on a view of T.C.M. from the
other school, which perceives it to be a complex, multi-generational
art to which literally thousands have made important contributions.
Thus the source of an idea must be known if clinicians are to judge
the utility of information for their own practice. It is not that
we doubt the value of clinical experience -- our translation teams
often include senior Asian clinicians -- it is that we believe the
clinical experience available in Chinese and Japanese to be so valuable
that the effort to transmit it in English deserves the scrutiny
and contributions of many.
We propose that even the everyday Chinese characters used in traditional
healing arts (and these were by no means the only characters used)
were given specific meaning by the shared experience of apprenticeship
and
the generations of medical literature available to those who read
Chinese and Japanese. Thus, we begin with the assumption that Chinese
terms have meanings specific to time, place and technical application.
The terminology and nomenclature of T.C.M. are not only large, sophisticated
and technical but are rooted in the cultures that created the ideas.
People who write or publish from this perspective, tend to use a
standard dictionary or gloss so that their peers can examine their
work and their readers can reference the definitions they have used.
For us then, C.O.M.P. is both a reader service and a public responsibility.
This does not imply that there is no role for personal exposition
and opinion about Chinese medicine, or that there is no need for
books that summarize or abbreviate traditional Asian medical concepts
for readers who will not apply them clinically, for students early
in their learning careers, or to familiarize conventional Western
medical practitioners. It means only that we believe that
Asian writers should be given a real chance to be heard and understood
in their own voice. Further reading about these issues
is available on our references pages.
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