Program Overview
The China Traditional Medicine Exchange Program builds a bridge between cultures, presenting Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) not merely as a medical system but as a comprehensive way of understanding life, health, and the cosmos. It invites scholars, practitioners, and students to engage deeply with TCM through lectures, immersive experiences, and hands-on training.
Program Goals
This program introduces participants to the foundational texts of Chinese medicine, including the Huangdi Neijing and Shanghan Lun, treating them as integrated frameworks that connect the body, mind, and world. It encourages direct engagement with TCM practices through acupuncture, tuina massage, herbal medicine preparation, and qigong, allowing participants to experience the logic of the medicine physically. It also creates space for dialogue, placing Chinese medicine in conversation with global discussions on health, ecology, and ethics.
Curriculum & Activities
The curriculum combines close reading of classical texts with opportunities to observe their application in clinical practice. Participants join guided seminars that explore medical classics with attention to both historical commentary and modern scholarship. A highlight of the program is the hospital internship, where participants enter partner clinics and hospitals, observe patient consultations, learn diagnostic techniques such as pulse and tongue reading, and assist in supervised treatments. This clinical immersion allows participants to experience how TCM operates in real-world healthcare settings. Alongside the clinical work, lectures by senior physicians, medical historians, and comparative philosophers provide a deeper understanding of diagnostic theory, therapeutic principles, and the ethical dimensions of healing. The program concludes with an international forum, where participants reflect on their experience and share perspectives on chronic illness, mental health, and sustainability.
Vision
The program reframes Chinese medicine as a holistic epistemology of life rather than as a marginal alternative to biomedicine. It seeks to cultivate a new generation of internationally minded scholars and practitioners who combine deep textual knowledge with embodied skill and clinical experience.
Contemporary Relevance
In an era marked by fragmented healthcare and ecological challenges, Chinese medicine offers a vision of health as a relational, systemic process. By entering the hospital setting, participants witness TCM’s role in community care and learn how healing can become an act of aligning body, society, and environment.