| Every preface is an effort on the part of an author to explain why he is writing this particular book, and no other. In my own case, I have been trying for almost two decades, in my teachings and in my writings, to share with other students and practitioners what is essential to the practice of acupuncture, this ancient Eastern practice that has made its way to the West. Rather than attempt to develop new theories or concepts, I have tried to get underneath these theories and concepts of acupuncture to clarify what it is like to practice acupuncture and what it might actually be doing for our patients. |
| In Bodymind Energetics,1 I wanted to show how acupuncture fit within the spaces between psychosomatic medicine, rapidly on the decline twenty years ago, and behavioral medicine which was replacing it. While the theories and therapies of these various disciplines were very different indeed, the patients they treated were often the same: people with chronic malaise, chronic exhaustion, chronic visceral complaints, chronic pain, who had no real medical diagnosis. I wanted to demonstrate to acupuncturists in the West that, while adopting an Eastern medical practice, they were also inheriting a Western legacy of suffering whose spectrum ran the gamut from the malingerers and hypochondriacs of the 19th century to those with multiple allergies and chronic fatigue in the 20th. |
| In Acupuncture Imaging,2 I wanted to lay bare my biases or organizing metaphors. An organizing metaphor is a set of concepts that stands in for a particular reality in order to organize and make sense of that reality. From a certain philosophical point of view, all that we humans can do is create such "stand-in" concepts or ideas that stand in for reality. The acupuncture meridian system3 is just such an organizing metaphor which, for me, stands in for the actual reality of the way the human body grows constricted and irritated on its soft tissue surface. If an organizing metaphor helps us better navigate in the real world, it is powerful. |
| As a doctoral student of French Philosophy, I studied with the late renowned Michel Foucault. From a medical anthropological perspective, he showed how all practitioners of |
 | | | | 1Seem, Mark D. and Kaplan, Joan, Bodymind Energetics: Toward a Dynamic Model of Health, Thorson's, Rochester, VT, 1987 |
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