1. Mainstream science does not approve
After 30 years of research into qigong and exceptional functions of the human body, and although colleagues in medicine, physics and sports science have gradually joined the work, we still take the occasional irrational broadside from mainstream science, which is uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of. Yet looking back at the last fifty years of these traditional practices, traditional Chinese medicine included, it is hard not to sigh at how fields like this one have had to depend on political will to move forward, rather than emerging spontaneously from the academic community. It also shows how modern science has, in spirit, turned into its own opposite — caught in a self-satisfied and rather unscientific delusion that whatever science has not yet touched does not exist.
2. The hard road of traditional Chinese medicine
Take traditional Chinese medicine. With Chen Li-Fu's backing, the China Medical College was founded, which just about kept a thread of the tradition alive within academia — but in a medical world led by Western medicine it had little voice. In 1974 US President Nixon visited mainland China and saw with his own eyes a patient talking to the surgeon during an operation, which brought home the power of acupuncture anesthesia. One of the editors travelling with the delegation happened to develop appendicitis, and was reported to have recovered after being needled at the appendix point. On the delegation's return, the US National Institutes of Health promptly set aside substantial funding for acupuncture research, and from then on acupuncture became known worldwide. Thirty years later, it is a treatment that most US states allow to be covered by formal medical insurance. One dramatic event, plus political will, carried the acupuncture side of Chinese medicine onto the world stage and into scientific respectability.
In Taiwan, 24 years after Nixon's visit, the National Taiwan University College of Medicine formally brought acupuncture into its clinical system in 1998. And the rest of Chinese medicine? Chang Gung University finally established a department of Chinese medicine within its medical school, also in 1998. The reason was simple: the chairman of the board, Wang Yung-Ching, believed in qigong and Chinese medicine and practiced qigong diligently himself. With his backing, the dominant Western medicine departments were in no position to object.
3. It takes politicians with nerve
The same goes, even more so, for research into qigong and exceptional functions. In Taiwan, without the vision and persistence of Chen Li-An, chairman of the National Science Council in 1988, and in mainland China, without the firm support of Qian Xuesen and Zhang Zhenhuan in the 1980s and of General Secretary Hu Yaobang, none of it could ever have got off the ground, and none of today's results would exist.
In the United States, thanks to one senior senator's insistence, the National Institutes of Health set up an Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992 with a budget of two million US dollars. In 1998 it was restructured as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and by 1999 its budget had reached one hundred and fourteen million US dollars. It funds all kinds of research into traditional practices — distant healing, qigong, prayer, acupuncture, the action of external qi on cells and much else besides. When I was invited to an international conference in Hawaii in 2001, I saw for myself how fast this research was moving in the United States. Given the scale of American funding, I believe the field can enter mainstream science before long and win general acceptance.
What force leads most scientists in the academic community to such certainty that they turn science on its head without noticing, and have to be corrected by politics? I think it is the consequence of Western reductionism taken to its extreme. The spirit of reductionism is that everything must be broken down, simplified and analyzed, which leads to the standardized procedures of molecules, atoms and quarks. Anything that cannot be reduced or standardized is deemed unscientific. In fact, though, many phenomena of the body do not belong to the reductionist domain and have to be understood through its opposite, holism. Its hallmark is that one plus one is greater than two: how a whole system behaves depends on its environment and on its own state. Hence the old saying that a headache may be treated at the foot, and the principle that the same complaint calls for different approaches in different people according to their condition, with no single standard procedure. It seems that research beyond the borders of science needs politicians with nerve to break the reductionist spell and pull scientists out of the swamp of blind disbelief. My hope is that, as models of complex spacetime and the quantum mind are put forward and take hold, more of the scientific community will join in mind-body-spirit research, and gradually escape a position where only political backing keeps it alive.
