On a campus bustling with pre-med students toting cumbersome chemistry textbooks and complaining about single-digit medical school acceptance rates, a number of students are trying to infuse their studies with an alternative - alternative medicine, that is.
Introduction to Traditional Chinese Medicine is one of the largest Group Independent Study Projects Brown has ever approved, according to the GISP's student organizer, Kevin Liou '10. The group numbers 17 registered students and several non-registered students, each of whom represents a different background and set of interests.
The course tackles issues related to traditional Chinese medicine from scientific, cultural and public health angles, bringing in speakers from various fields to lecture students on their areas of expertise.
"It's a lot of reading," Liou said, adding that it's been difficult to acclimate to the Eastern way of thinking about medicine and the human body.
The group meets regularly to discuss readings and hear from guest speakers and practitioners, such as acupuncturists and herbalists.
About half of the students involved in the GISP said they are pre-med, and a handful said they hope to practice alternative medicine as a career. Regardless of how they hope to integrate the aims of the course into their career, students agreed that taking the class was about broadening perspectives and thinking alternatively.
"It's good food for thought," Dan Woolridge '10 said. "It's good to take away that whole sense of holism that Eastern medicine prides itself on."
William Chen '10, who said he plans to pursue a career in Western medicine, said he is drawn to these ideals of holism and patient interaction in his study of alternative medical practices.
Some students, like Chen - who lived in Shanghai for nine years before matriculating at Brown - were exposed to traditional Eastern medical practices at home as children. Others, like Woolridge, who said he cultivated an interest in Eastern philosophies by reading the well-known Chinese book the I Ching and other texts, are simply attracted to a viewpoint that sees patients as "living people ... not just blood and viruses and pathogens," Woolridge said.
Chen said while students like him are attracted to the Eastern take on medical practice, many Westerners are more skeptical.
"There's this stigma against Chinese medicine. There's this fear of uncertainty," Chen said, noting that many Western medical practitioners and patients often see it as "quaint" or "folksy."
Bob Heffron, an internist turned acupuncturist who spoke to the class last week about acupuncture, said he thought holistic principles were missing from Western medicine. Modern doctors, he said, "don't have time. They frankly don't want to know about your life ... They're not bringing in your attitudes, your family life."
The dichotomy between mind and body in Western medicine is, for many of the students involved in the GISP, troublesome.
"I'm not sure if I want to go to med school," said Conrad Stern-Ascher '09, a Herald opinions columnist. "I'm definitely very skeptical of Western medicine."
"There's not a lot of holism in Western medicine," Stern-Ascher added. "The practitioner will just look at the patient as problems, parts within the whole," he said, pointing out how quick-fix medicines that target individual symptoms often have unpleasant side-effects.
In fact, the impetus to begin studying alternative forms of medicine, for Liou, was this very realization.
In high school, Liou, currently a student in the Program in Liberal Medical Education, said he "did the whole deal: volunteering in the hospital, volunteering in the nursing home. I thought that bio was the way to go." But then Liou "started talking to patients," he said. "I realized the way I could help them wasn't with my biological knowledge."
Liou said he remembers playing the piano for a group of elderly Alzheimer's patients, seeing how visibly happy it made them and realizing that Western medicine may not have all of the answers.
Despite the profound ideological and practical differences between Eastern and Western medicine, Heffron said, the two schools can be compatible.
"I mean, you can be a surgeon and practice holistic medicine," he said. "It's about how you treat your patients."
And despite their relatively small number, these students said they want to get the greater Brown community involved.
As the semester's culminating project, all of the students involved in the GISP are putting on a health clinic in early December with demonstrations, speakers and food. Liou added that the group had initially hoped to have an acupuncturist on hand, but legal issues precluded it.
"Part of the goal of a liberal arts education is to broaden your mind," Liou said.
