New Books In Medicine

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science Studies. Not a typical conference volume, the book is instead the result of years of continuing collaboration among the editors and authors, and celebrates the spirit of collaborative work in every aspect of its structure and material. The chapters collectively explore some key ideas that thread through the work and are of broad relevance to the histories and practices of health and healing: the nature of “authenticity” in alternative and complementary health practices; the problem of standardization; learning through best practices and best practitioners; and the changing and plural nature of evidence and proof in the contemporary world. The materi