Cultivating Medical Intentionality: The Phenomenology of Diagnostic Virtuosity in East Asian Medicine.

Summary

Diagnostic virtuosity in East Asian medicine arises when a practitioner's body cultivates a medically-tinged intentionality that interconnects consciousness with medically significant qualities in patients. The East Asian notion of "Image" maximizes the body's perceptual capacity and minimizes reduction by linguistic re-presentation, enabling practitioners to somatically conceptualize core notions like Yin-Yang and use them as an embodied litmus during clinical encounters. This process develops through apprenticeship, where novices organize perceptual experience through numerous clinical transactions. The article provides an example of knowing and caring practices institutionalized outside the culture of science, challenging reductionist frameworks that congeal existential and perceptual vitality within scientific explanatory models.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This study examines the perceptual basis of diagnostic virtuosity in East Asian medicine, combining Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and an ethnographic investigation of Korean medicine in South Korea. A novice, being exposed to numerous clinical transactions during apprenticeship, organizes perceptual experience that occurs between him or herself and patients. In the process, the fledgling practitioner's body begins to set up a medically-tinged "intentionality" interconnecting his or her consciousness and medically significant qualities in patients. Diagnostic virtuosity is gained when the practitioner embodies a cultivated medical intentionality. In the process of becoming a practitioner imbued with virtuosity, this study focuses on the East Asian notion of "Image" that maximizes the body's perceptual capacity, and minimizes possible reductions by linguistic re-presentation. "Image" enables the practitioner to somatically conceptualize the core notions of East Asian medicine, such as Yin-Yang, and to use them as an embodied litmus as the practitioner's cultivated body instinctively conjures up medical notions at clinical encounters. In line with anthropological critiques of reductionist frameworks that congeal human existential and perceptual vitality within a "scientific" explanatory model, this article attempts to provide an example of various knowing and caring practices, institutionalized external to the culture of science.