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Posts Tagged ‘medicine’

Various ideas and speculation about relationship between art and medicine can be found in Western thought since the time of ancient Greek Philosopher such as Aristotle. To mention few examples: that “genius” or exceptional artistic talent was a kind of mental disorder (illness), or the experience of pain and suffering is useful or necessary for a man of letters (the thinking of Goethe, for instance), or that art has the potential to cure illness.  Medicine itself understood in two different ways, some people treat it as an “art” (the art of healing), while at the same time since there is advance in medicine biomedical/West, it is also treated as a “science”. In recent time, then, began to be distinguished between “medicine” (the science of healing) and the “art of medicine”.

An important issue of the medical situation, as happen in Indonesia for instance, is the presence of pluralism system of medicine in which various ways of different treatment can be present side by side. The most dominant of that issue are related to ethnic traditional medical system, including magical elements as well as treatment of biomedical which coming form Western. Pluralism brings a variety of issues, mainly because the formal health system (health centers, hospitals, medical education at the university, and so on) almost completely hold on biomedical systems, while traditional medical system also known in the community.

There are quite striking comparison between the image of traditional medicine (for example: the image of the shaman) and biomedical medical images (or image of a doctor). Traditional medical system directly related to the customs and beliefs of local communities, for example: a person can become sick because his body was possessed by spirits, and spells are considered to be an effective way to ward off disease. At the same time, modern medicine relies on knowledge of medical science as well as the use of modern medical facilities (pharmaceutical product) to identify the illnesses suffered by a person. Even so, some people may think modern medicine is much better and reasonable, while traditional medicine is full of superstition, but at the same time, we may also count in our mind that not always the “old” and “cheesy” was so bad or stupid at all. And in the discourse of traditional medical treatment seems quite powerful, at least in the form of values ??in society.

Acupuncture is the art of alternative medicine that tries to cure patients’ disease in a way by manipulation and insertion needles into specific points located in the body. Such treatment is not only aim to cure disease, but also prevent it. It is also believed to serves as an infertility treatment. In addition, the art of acupuncture is also believed to contain elements of treatment that can not be fully understood by modern medical science.

Medical treatment with a needle is said to have originated from China, and is believed to have been there in the second century BC. From the country of origin, theory and practice of acupuncture art was later spread to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. While there may be differences with what is taught in his native country, but that art of medicine has been practiced widely and in different ways in different parts of the world. In Europe for example, examination of the 5,000-year-old mummy called Otzi the Iceman has identified a set of 15 pieces tattoos on his body, some of the tattoos which placed at certain points of the body are now known as contemporary acupuncture points.

In essence, treatment with acupuncture has a different concept as we might know in modern medical science. Traditional acupuncture was developed with a priority to know the human anatomy and cell theory based on modern biological sciences. One powerful feature that can be found on acupuncture treatment is the existence of qi, or energy that surrounds human body, a thing which of course can not be proved scientifically by modern medical science.