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Intercultural Incommensurability and the Globalization of Chinese Medicine: The Case of Acupuncture

Abstract It is normally assumed that the globalization of medical practice emanates from the West, but the Chinese practice of acupuncture has proven this hypothesis incorrect. Western medicine has not rejected the concept of acupuncture. It has embraced it and has investigated the benefits that such practices provide. Since Western medicine is already framed within the epistemological context of germ theory, the problem becomes one of finding a way in which such a disparate tradition can be incorporated into current models of medicine. The explanation of this journey begins with Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and how that model constitutes modern scientific practice. The germ theory of modern medicine is introduced and compared to the Chinese medical model of acupuncture. The incommensurability between those two models is discussed within the context of the globalization of Chinese medicine. It is argued that instead of rejecting such practices, modern medicine has incorporated them into a new theory which they call medical acupuncture, a model concomitant with the tenets of western scientific research.