In mid-2014, six months after the death of patient zero, the two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou in Guinea, there were frequent reports of Ebola spikes across Guinea and beyond other parts of West Africa. I had just defended my PhD and soon after was accepted for a postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes University, South Africa for the following year. In …
Tag Archives: Alternative medicine
Needles to needles: how ear acupuncture can work for substance use recovery
Helen was telling me about her day while I poured tea. Suddenly, the double doors swung open and a middle-aged man in a worn grey jacket briskly walked in. He looked at us, pointed to the room behind us, and blurted out, “Ear acupuncture?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “Have you been here before?”
The man nodded and walked past us into …
Emptiness and the Medical Encounter: The interior spatial requirements of encountering
…Thirty spokes converge in a hub
There where there is nothing,
That is the chariot’s usefulness.
Fashion earth to make a vase from it,
There where there is nothing,
That is the vessel’s usefulness– Lao Zi
Emptiness…makes it possible to move about freely and succeeds in ‘letting pass’. The important thing is not to determine ‘what’ passes – assuming
Book review – Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
University of California Press, 2012
344 pp., US$34.95 paperback
It is a truism that the world we live in today is increasingly interconnected. Yet, when it comes to medicine – and particularly “traditional” or alternative medicine – the tendency is often to delimit its study along …