Thursday, October 14, 2010

So Long for Now, Emperor's College

I dove in. I committed. I paid my tuition and bought a pile of extraordinarily expensive books on Chinese Medicine (on half.com).

I went in with an open mind, ready to do it.

But after my second class I was not impressed. And my Hasidic Jewish Traditional Chinese Medicine teacher haunted my dreams. I got used to the constant Jewish allusions and the Hebrew to describe Chinese concepts. It no longer even rattled me.

What got to me was his direct claims, and constant insinuations about the powers of Chinese Medicine. You have to remember, I did not go in as a skeptic, but a believer. I know that TCM doctors have been fighting for recognition, to work in Integrative Medicine settings, and to overcome a bias, on the part of western doctors, to believe that most doctors of alternative medicine border on quacks and are sloppy with science.

I have fought with editors to take this profession seriously, and I have been impressed with acupuncture in treating nausea during pregnancy, mood swings do to my menstrual cycle, and pain in my knee, which a western doctor said would never ever improve.

But over the course of two classes our teacher either insinuated or claimed that 1) he had helped cure a young man's homosexuality by giving him more yang (his voice dropped, he started to like sports, he was less effeminate) 2) he helped a woman with cancer, with his help it was in remission, when her orthodox jewish husband forbade him to continue his treatments because the treatments were too intimate, three months later the woman died and 3) he treated a mongoloid child and after many treatments the child no longer appeared mongoloid. This is because acupuncture and TCM can change DNA. When pressed on the topic by some of the biochemists and medical school bound students in the class he backed off and it became clear he did not understand the difference between a gene and DNA.

He thanked us for challenging him. But the alarming thing was to hear him make these sloppy claims which stick in your mind, without a real understanding of what he was saying.

So I am withdrawing. Mostly because the time and the distance made the class much more complicated for my family than I anticipated. But if my teacher had been more rigorous and less sloppy I think I would have muscled through.

It is so hard for me to quit, so terribly terribly hard. But I hold in my heart that the reason I was taking this course was to explore the idea of becoming an Alternative Medicine Doc. This class will be required if I formally enter any program. But what I now know is that I need to do much more investigation of any school I might enroll in, of their classes, their professors, and the scientific/medical rigor of their program.

That would serve me better than sitting in on a class.

I loved the material. But I could not get past the rest of it.

For now, I'm done.

Perhaps I will sign up again with a different teacher for a class during the day.

Emotional. And disappointing.

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