Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine

(don’t forget to also see the Beijing TCM Hospital Photopage)

My stay at the Beijing Hospital of TCM was made possible by Liu Jing, a doctor of TCM and colleague in Boston, who introduced me to Dr. Wang Lin Peng (Director and Vice-Chief Physician) and Dr. Li Ping (Associate Director of the Beijing Institute of Chinese Medicine) during the Second World Integrative Medicine Conference – which I attended in Beijing. After I gave a lecture on my research projects to their staff, I was allowed to come to the outpatient department and intern under Dr. Zhu Wei. An interesting aside. Because the hospital was undergoing construction, I had to wait for permission from the Hospital head to come for my stay. I was finally allowed to come after a brief lesson in Chinese beurocratic red-tape (it’s not a coincidence that it’s red!). The permission came appropriately after the 16 Party Congress had finally passed.
Once I was there, however, it was a wonderful experience. Because of the construction, I was the only foreign student in at least my immediate area, and perhaps the entire hospital. Dr. Zhu was an experienced and affable physician, who welcomed me as openly, if not more so, than the three to five other Chinese students that also followed him around from patient to patient, checked patient’s blood pressure, removed the needles, and performed cupping and administrative tasks. Upon graduating high school in 1969, Dr. Zhu became one of the famed “barefoot doctors” during the Cultural Revolution. With minimal TCM training, he was sent to the countryside to provide medical assistance and be “re-educated” into the Communist fold in a peasant village work camp. He lived this harsh life for 8 years before returning to Beijing to more formally study TCM at one of the Chinese medicine colleges. His travels also included a 4-year stay at a Yugoslavian hospital. He is self-taught in English and was the only English outlet in my day-to-day life at the hospital.
		China has just entered the WTO, and there is a massive drive to modernize and improve the image of China to the Western world. This mission extends also to TCM where every effort is being made (and actually has been made for a number of years, since the original “opening” of China with Richard Nixon’s visit in 1973) to transform traditional Chinese medicine into a more scientifically credentialed form of healthcare. This is all the most telling in the mural seen on my main China 2002 webpage. This mural actually extends about 50ft, somewhat further than is pictured in the included image. The last scene depicts the modernization of TCM [left]; the laptop computer reads “TCM China.”

| Beijing TCM Hospital Photopage | Main |