This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

This book analyses the process of modernization of health and healing practices, and documents in detail the current trend among people who use both traditional and modern medicine. It has two unique and important features. One is the focus - five nations in Asia (China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) which are at different stages of social and economic development, are studied and compared, providing a current and detailed picture of the combination of traditional and modern ways of healing. The second unique feature is that each chapter is written by scholars who not only have the advantage of firsthand knowledge of the situation in their respective countries but also bring into their analyses their extensive research experience int he areas of medical sociology and medical history. Moreover, as a book written in English, it offers valuable up-to-date information on the Chinese, Japanese and Thai health care systems, which is usually not accessible to readers unfamiliar with these languages.

Traditional East Asian healthcare systems have moved rapidly from the fringes of healthcare systems in the West towards the centre over the past 50 years. This change of status for traditional medicines presents their practitioners with both opportunities and challenges as the focus shifts from one of opposition towards one of integration into biomedically dominated healthcare systems. Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare examines the opportunities and challenges of integrating East Asian medicine into Western healthcare systems from an interdisciplinary perspective. Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson bring together contributions from acknowledged experts from a number of different disciplines - including clinical researchers, Chinese Medicine practitioners, historians, medical anthropologists, experts in the social studies of science, technology and medicine - to examine and debate the impact of the evidence-based medicine movement on the ongoing modernization of East Asian medicines. The book considers the following questions: •What are the values, goals and ethics implicit within traditional East Asian medical practices? • What claims to effectiveness and safety are made by East Asian medical practices? •What is at stake in subjecting these medical practices to biomedical models of evaluation? • What constitutes best practice? How is it to be defined and measured? • What are the ideologies and politics behind the process of integration of East Asian medical practices into modern health care systems? • What can we learn from a variety of models of integration into contemporary healthcare?

"From the perspectives of history and cultural anthropology, the authors consider problems of knowledge in Chinese medicine, the Hindu-Buddhist traditions of South Asian medicine, and the Greco-Arabic traditions of Islamic medicine.".