Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine

Book excerpt: Chinese medicine approaches emotions and emotional disorders differently than the Western biomedical model. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine offers an ethnographic account of emotion-related disorders as they are conceived, talked about, experienced, and treated in clinics of Chinese medicine in contemporary China. While Chinese medicine (zhongyi) has been predominantly categorized as herbal therapy that treats physical disorders, it is also well known that Chinese patients routinely go to zhongyi clinics for treatment of illness that might be diagnosed as psychological or emotional in the West. Through participant observation, interviews, case studies, and zhongyi publications, both classic and modern, the author explores the Chinese notion of "body-person," unravels cultural constructions of emotion, and examines the way Chinese medicine manipulates body-mind connections.