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Chasing the Dragon's Tail |
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By Stephen Birch
1995 - Yoshio MANAKA with Kazuko ITAYA and Stephen BIRCH Summary by Dennis Linhares Barsted Dr. Yoshio Manaka, a renowned Japanese physician, healer and scholar, died on the 20th of November, 1989, without having time to see published his Chasing the Dragon's Tail, a book systematically organizing and presenting his extremely rich and creative theoretical, experimental and clinical experience and propositions. To fully understand the work of Yoshio Manaka, it is important to place it in its wider context. With this opening statement, Stephen Birch, proceeds to present a very interesting summary of this context. Preliminary, he poses that both Western science, Western methodology and Western medicine and traditional Eastern medicine are experiencing a crisis. He recalls that Eastern traditional medicine always had many different schools of thought, but always within their basic paradigms. With the influx of Western science, methodology and medicine, and the global dissemination of Eastern traditional medicine, new developments have arisen. For didactic purposes, Birch divides the current trends into three general categories: a) the "traditional approaches"; b) the "scientific" approaches and c) the "integrationalist" approach. The traditional approach attempts to retain the richness and original integrity of the Eastern traditional medicine resorting to the classic texts, concepts and practice. Only the traditional language of Eastern traditional medicine is permitted, being everything defined within this discourse. He cites as examples of this approach the keiraku chiryo or "channel treatment" school, the "Traditional Acupuncture" school and the ba gang bian zheng school. He confesses that he, himself, partook of this approach in his previous book with Matsumoto, Hara Diagnosis: Reflections on the Sea, Brookline, Massachusetts, Paradigm Publications, 1988. For the proponents of the "scientific" approach, the only valid models of acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine are those based in scientific study and observation that strictly adhere to Western scientific methodology. It is also characterized by the dismissal or trivialization of concepts and procedures that do not easily relate to modern ideas. He considers as proponents of this school Mann, Baldry and Ulett1. He calls attention that this hard science approach actually accounts for a considerable body of current Chinese work and is in practice often found in works favored by the Traditional Chinese Medicine school of thought. While the traditional concepts are maintained, they are often re-defined in reductionistic terms2. The third approach, the integrationalist, tries to find correlations of acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine models with Western medical systems, explaining the terms and concepts of each in the language of the other and attempting to avoid rejection of the models and concepts of the other system. Examples of this approach and adapted versions are Requena, Voll and Nakatani3. Dr. NogierÌs auriculotherapy4 and the Koryo Sooji Chim hand acupuncture of Tae Woo Yoo, from Korea, are considered modern systems that cross the boundaries of these general categories. Birch suggests that in spite of much discussion, debate and conflict, several relevant issues remain unaddressed. Of these, the most critical differences lie at the level of the Eastern and Western knowledge paradigms. He proposes that the theories of acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine stand on the same theoretical ground with advanced Western science. Apparent conflicts exists because there is a conservative tendency to insist on traditional Western scientific paradigms, ignoring or refusing to acknowledge the advances of twentieth century science itself. With the exception of politically influenced modern Chinese works, acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine are founded on a non-reductionist, non-dualist, acausal paradigm. On the other hand, reductionism is the mainstay of modern Western biology, chemistry and medicine. Western science is based on a cause-effect model where all things follow a direct causal logic. He questions whether one can express the non-dualist, non-reductionalist and acausal medical system of acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine in the dualist, reductionalist and causal language of the West, specially that of Western science and medicine. Is such a description possible? He considers this issue to be the principal difficulty facing the traditional, the scientific and the integrationalist approaches to acupuncture and East Asian traditional medicine. If this is a problem for the scientific and traditional approaches, it is particularly problematic for the integrationalist school where the reciprocity of description is taken for granted. He suggests that if it should be possible to generate a larger world view that sacrifices neither the conceptual integrity and ingenuity of the traditional theories, nor the conceptual richness of modern science, enhancing both paradigmatic systems, one would have a model capable of carrying East Asian traditional medicine successfully and globally into the twenty-first century. He goes on to show that the Western paradigms are in a process of dissolution. The advances in modern physics, in the study of chaotic and thermodynamic systems, in quantum mechanics and, particularly, in inquiry methodology, indicate that the world is non-reducible, non-dualist and acausal. By what methods and with what language should this world be describe? Physicist David Bohm's has advanced a theory that the perceivable and measurable world, the world of our senses, corresponds to ripples on an ocean where the activities and rules of this hidden or implicate order have great significance relative to the observable or explicate order. Birch suggests that Bohm's theory and related models could be useful starting points for developing a model and a language for East Asian traditional medicine, thus dealing with hidden or enfolded orders in the body, such as those described by the medical theories of ancient China. After a brief analysis of the main characteristics of the General Systems Theory and the Information Theory, Birch proposes that their languages are capable of describing the paradigmatic world views assumptions of traditional Chinese theories. Further, these languages and their theoretical frameworks meet the criteria for the development of a model that encompasses both the Western and Eastern paradigms, allowing logically consistent description and formulation of experimental procedures adequate to both models. It is this context, according to Birch, Dr. Manaka's most relevant contribution has been the development of a model of East Asian traditional medicine using systems and information theory models. Based on years of clinical treatments, study, research and on the development of numerous innovative techniques, he formulated a coherent model of acupuncture as a method for modifying the biological information system. He first presented this idea in a benchmark paper, co-authored with Kazuko Itaya, "Acupuncture as Intervention in Biological Information System. Meridian Treatment and the X Signal System", at the annual assembly of the Japan Meridian Treatment Association, in Tokyo, on March, 1986. This paper was subsequently published in English in the Journal of the Acupuncture Society of New York 1:324, 9-18, 1994. Signal, in this context, is considered as something that has a very low energy content, but a high information content, which can be changed or modified by applying appropriate low-energy stimulus (signal) to certain points in the acupuncture channels. the X is used to emphasize that the exact nature of the signal is not known. It is suggested that it might not even be knowable. This X-signal system is seen as a model connecting both East Asian traditional medicine and Western medicine systems without contradicting each other. Birch considers that Manaka's proposal has permitted the systematic examination and testing of traditional theories and practices, something which is sadly lacking in most current research. He recalls that a feature of late traditional Chinese medicine, under strong Western ideological influence, has been to ignore much of the traditional literature that could not be made to fit the mould of empirical theories (see WISEMAN, Fundamentals of Chinese Medicine, p. xxxii - xxxv and p. 18; UNSCHULD, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas, p. 229) Manaka's model is considered to be still incipient, but an unique combination of theory, research and practice. It has the merit of being theoretically justified by traditional medical literature and verified by clinical research and clinical efficacy. Finally, it addresses significant epistemological issues such as the methods by which we inquire into or gather knowledge about nature as well as the criteria for judgements of what will constitute knowledge. Birch's summary stimulates us to chase the dragon's tail. NOTE: In the near future, we intend to present a short review on Dr. Manaka's book itself.
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