Note: today's post comes to us from Jonathan Schell, the driving force behind the Chinese Medicine Database, an online resource for doctors/practitioners, students, scholars, researchers and translators. If you are involved in Chinese medicine on any level and haven't heard of this wonderful resource, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
This was originally a post from the facebook page for the Chinese Medicine Database and has been reprinted in its entirety, with permission.
Today I am feeling especially driven. Maybe it was because I was sick for a week, and maybe it is because of the Tsunami in Japan, but I so passionately want -- to have so many more Chinese medical texts translated! We have the people just waiting to work, but just lack the funds.
I believe that the more texts that we translate, the more face of what we know as Chinese or Asian medicine will be changed. The thing is I need a few hundred people like yourselves to stand with me and bring this to fruition! A number of... you subscribe already, but I ask those of you that don't what would it take for you to subscribe?
I am not asking for me. I have yet to make money on the Database. I ask because what Book makes you salivate enough that you are willing to throw down your $20.00 per month to make it happen? Economy be damned. I believe that we are reaching a pivotal point with our field. We are big enough to be noticed, but not organized enough to fend for ourselves.
And so here it is -- my passionate howl into the vastness of Facebook -- In my opinion we are heading as a profession towards being absorbed. I put a time of 20 years to it. If you talk to people at the schools there is always more emphasis being put on Western techniques and less time in teaching Chinese medicine. The incentives are on merging Chinese medicine with Western medicine. And as with the most recent financial crisis -- we know that the incentives dominate the course of events.
I am not just passionate about the Classics because I am a big history buff, and love to talk about the past. No in fact I am a clinician just like the majority of you. The Classics serve to prod me into other states of consciousness which provides me with alternative insights. But why as a profession should we care about them? Because in my opinion, they are the only leg that we will have to stand on that irrefutably defends the uses for and the mechanisms of Chinese medicine. No person or organization can doubt 2,000 years worth of written material if it is readable in your own language. But if it is another person's language, we in the West have a tendency to think of things as primitive.
So when we are struggling to not be absorbed in 20 years, and we are all struggling -- it will be too late, my friends, to ask that our academics translate the texts to justify our position. There will be no time left, it would be like trying to raise wheat in winter. No, the time to bear the brunt of this work is before we need it, when we are strong and fresh, and not embattled defending our techniques -- loss of this to PT's, loss of that to Chiropractor's, loss of this other thing to MD's.
I am sorry to say that I don't have the $13 million dollars to translate the 400 main texts in my possession, because if I did I would spend it towards that purpose. But each of you has $20.00 and I have $20.00 and over the years 1,000 of us putting together our collective $20.00 will start to make a dent in that $13 million.
In 20 years I want to be able to say to my son, and your children -- "You know -- everyone said it was impossible -- that it would never happen -- but we pulled together as a community -- and WE MADE IT HAPPEN!" That would be truly awesome! And I think would change the face of Chinese Medicine as we know it.
I am one man, with a team of translators ready to work. I ask you whether you believe in the project or not, would you join me -- to say that you were part of it? To say to your children that we made something so amazing happen that it changed the way our profession understands the medicine? I built this system for us, to be used by us, so that we are never in the dark again.
This is what I am passionate about, and the fire to "Get to work" rages inside of me. I am tired of limping along, I want to start this Wonder of the World now!
Register at www.cm-db.com -- each of us can contribute a little bit to this project and together we can make it happen. I give you my word, which in my world means that I will make my word happen.
