Cultivating Medical Intentionality: The Phenomenology of Diagnostic Virtuosity in East Asian Medicine.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry March 1, 2017 Taewoo Kim 11 citations
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.