Evidence-Based Alternative, 'Slanted Eyes' and Electric Circuits: Doing Chinese Medicine in the Post/Socialist Czech Republic
Abstrakt
This chapter analyses concurrences and conflicts of three partially connected versions of Chinese medicine (CM) as it has been enacted in changing geopolitical, social and economic circumstances in the Czech Republic, namely: (1) 'medical acupuncture', institutionalised in the socialist Czechoslovakia as a specialisation within the state's biomedical healthcare system, (2) a dissident CM practised since the 1960s by individual doctors who embraced the epistemologically distinctive theory of health and disease of 'traditional' CM and which, after 1989, became institutionalised at private schools and clinics while marginalised by the biomedical establishment, and (3) a state-supported version of CM that has been imported to the country since 2013 as a pillar of the revived economic and political cooperation between the Czech Republic and China as a rising global power.