East Asian Medicine Doesn't Need to be “Proven"

Dear friends, brace yourselves. This is going to be a bit of a rant.

This particular rant was inspired by Highmark health insurance (credit where credit’s due). I spoke with a customer service representative there a few months ago to check my client’s benefits. Over the course of the conversation, I was told that my client’s plan would pay for acupuncture if administered for low back pain. Any other reason would be considered experimental and subjected to a medical necessity review. 

To be frank, calling acupuncture experimental is racist, and constitutes epistemological violence. 

This means using one system of knowing to denigrate knowledge that originates from a different system of knowing. Essentially, because acupuncture has not been “verified” to the satisfaction of those in power by the methods of modern research, Highmark health insurance company has deemed it experimental. The violence here is that millennia of research, discovery, study, and practice are automatically undermined by this statement. What validates this violence is racism, as in “it’s ok to discredit this form of medicine because it comes from an indigenous culture.”

East Asian medicine arises from an ancient worldview and it is a science in its own right. 

There are some brilliant researchers using modern scientific design to further explore this medicine, but in no way does East Asian medicine require any further validation from modern science in order to be legitimized. If anything, intelligently designed acupuncture research can help us learn more about the human body. 

Around the beginning of 2021, when COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely available in the United States, I heard an interview on the radio with a well-studied virologist. She said something along the lines of, “There’s no “believing” in science or “not-believing” in science; it’s not a choice.” She was saying this in response to some people’s doubts about the vaccine. 

Now, I’m not weighing in on the vaccine controversy at large here. I’m vaccinated and glad for it. However, it struck me how utterly dogmatic this person’s statement was. It had the same tone of attachment as someone defending a fundamentalist religious view. In addition to her statement that science is objectively true and therefore not subject to belief, there was the subtext that we have complete license to disbelieve (or call “experimental”) anything not deemed “science” by modern medical standards. 

Who gets to decide what is “science” and what’s not? 

And aren’t those decisions about where to draw the line a result of the (often unconsciously) held belief systems of the decider? Systems which are themselves not verifiable according to the scientific method?

You may have picked up a note of anger in my words here (chuckle). I can get riled up when coming up against this type of ignorance, especially when I’m on the phone with an insurance company, advocating for my client to get the care they need, want, and deserve. But underneath all that hot-headedness is something softer and more tender: grief. 

We have so much to learn from the very people and cultures who our modern judgments have deemed insignificant.

I yearn deeply for a world in which all humanity’s treasures are valued and supported for the benefit of all beings. I yearn deeply for a world in which the people who cultivate and protect those treasures are collectively held as kin, along with the plants, animals, and myriad of other beings who we have yet to meet. I yearn deeply for a world in which we don’t have to prove ourselves, and our energy can be repurposed towards caring for each other and enjoying this phenomenally auspicious situation we find ourselves in. C’mon, let’s make it happen.