Iris's Explanatory Model

Superior Essays
In this paper, I examine my interviewee Iris’s motive to visit her traditional Chinese doctor (zhongyi) and her preference for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to unravel her explanatory model, which centers around the concept of tiaoli, that is, a notion of health and well-being. It stands in contradistinction to biomedical scientific notions of health, since it does not perceive the body as a condition that needs to be cured and restored. Rather, tiaoli frames the body as a garden and the doctor as a gardener who will continuously nourish the body to strive for improvement and perfection.
Iris’s drive to seek medical care was to tiaoli her body. Tiaoli is a missing concept in the English speaking societies. She defines tiaoli as “to make
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Barnes in her article Plural Health Systems: Meanings and Analytical issues examine the concept of medical pluralism in specific settings. She argues that the medical systems are not fixed and are responsive to changes in economic, political, and other social factors. Overall, she claims that different therapeutic systems cannot be entirely separated from culture and that there will always be potential allies. Similarly, my interviewee’s explanatory model of the best medical treatment is strongly shaped by culture. Her experience with Western hospital and zhongyi illustrates the experiences that may arise based on differences in compatibility of explanatory models. Since TCM and Iris share a set of cultural beliefs, she had strong preferences of TCM over Western medicine. Although Iris does not receive satisfactory care from Western medicine, she does not neglect the effectiveness its treatment. She states that the best treatment is one that combines both Western medicine and Chinese medicine since they differ in effectiveness at treating various kinds of people. Ultimately, both Barnes and Iris envision the creation of an integrative system between different practitioners including the professional, folk and popular and believe those relationships will benefit the treatment of …show more content…
He points out many medical anthropological approaches to explain health and illness in terms of a few oversimplified cultural rules and beliefs offers an impoverished understanding of both culture and medicine. He also explains why zhongyi enjoys such a high popularity. His interpretation is that zhongyi shares with its patients a system of cultural values and recognizes the incessant circulation between the physiological, psychological, and the social. This book explains the phenomenon of my interviewee’s need to tiaoli her body and why the endocrine section, which controls emotional well-being, of the traditional Chinese hospital is the most popular. The interviewee was looking for a treatment that cures physiological, psychological and social illness. However, in order to perform this holistic treatment, doctors must share a common system of cultural values with the patients. Accordingly, the reason for high patient dissatisfaction of Western medicine is because the doctors are only treating the physical diseases. Western practitioners are ignoring the cultural influences behind the patient’s explanatory model. Many physicians are aware of this and have developed many methods such as cultural competency to mend this. However, this will not work because culture cannot be taught, which allows me to reach the conclusion that

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