Today we begun our day with yet another new preceptor: Dr. Chen (陳建安醫師). Dr. Chen's specialty was oncology and the use of acupuncture to help alleviate the adverse effects of cancer treatment and also for recovery for stroke patients. Since it is a relatively slow morning, we spent much time talking to Dr. Chen, asking many of the questions that was raised from our observation of Dr. Ho yesterday. For example, we were curious about how the TCM doctors resolve the issue of simultaneous treatment by both western and Chinese medicine. Unfortunately, Dr. Chen does not think there is a well researched consensus among TCM doctors either on this issue. Some say at least 4 hours in between and some say 1 to 1.5 hour. We also asked about why we do not see any Tui-Na or traumatology in the clinics. To our surprise, Dr. Chen answered that Tui-Na is no longer practiced by the TCM doctors, instead, they are practiced mainly by chiropractors/massage therapists due to its low pay (problem with the national health insurance in Taiwan) and its taxing nature on the practitioner's hands and physical energy. Although I was surprised that it is no longer practiced, I was not surprised that it pays little, since I think most manual medicine will probably face similar problem with the insurance agencies, nor was I surprised that it was also because it is too tiring for the practitioners, since that is also a problem with OMT for the DO doctors too.
After asking our questions, Dr. Chen also gave us a short presentation covering many more commonly know acupuncture points, such as 合谷, 陽陵泉, 足三里...etc. I was pleasantly surprised that I actually know few of them just from observing Dr. Hsieh yesterday, which makes me even more excited for the afternoon session with Dr. Chen, since he would not be as busy as yesterday and will probably have more time to teach us and answer the questions we have for TCM.
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