Welcome to the Lantern!
The Lantern: Volume I, Issue 1 - Article #1
One hundred years of Chinese medicine history in Australia, four universities teaching full-time degree courses in Chinese medicine, and yet Chinese medicine publications are extremely limited here. Harley Gale has done a wonderful job publishing the Pacific Journal for many years, all alone, and would probably be the first to acknowledge (we hope) the increasing need for another publication.
The Lantern team have all, at one time or another, worked on the ACMERC Journal (the journal of the Australian Chinese Medicine Education and Research Council). Although The Lantern is not affiliated with the council, we salute its ideals and value the experience without which, it must be said, we would not be undertaking this project. We will, however, be continuing the focus on the practical, clinical information that made the ACMERC Journal so popular.
Essays, case histories ancient and modern, excerpts from the classical texts and any of the estimated 10,000 extant works published over the past 20 centuries in this field — techniques, suggestions, warnings, and secrets — all of these will be the threads to make up our weave.
Our design is to reflect more of the tradition of Chinese medicine, in all of its multitudinous variety, to balance the tendency towards discarding aspects of Chinese medicine simply because they do not match the current dominant paradigm of Western biomedicine.
One of the many strengths of Chinese medicine lies precisely in its holding out a different view, a different approach, to the tyranny of the microscope ("if it isn’t microscopic, it isn’t real"). We believe it is foolish to artificially limit ourselves to technologically assisted methods of diagnosis. Our bodies provide us with remarkably clear, albeit sometimes subtle, signals of disorder, if one has the framework for interpreting them. Chinese medicine is one such framework, extensively user-tested.
We wish to preserve a balance in the resources available to the practitioner in addition to pharmaceutical studies and clinical trials (which are well represented elsewhere); to allow those who may not as yet have personal access to the vast pool of TCM writings in Chinese — held in trust, as it were, through the centuries — to dip into this deep well and take a refreshing draught.
And who knows? Perhaps, acquiring a taste for such refreshment, some may be inspired to spend the several years of work needed to access this well directly themselves, and then in turn help provide for others.
In any case, we hope you find our content useful, entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring, because that is the criteria by which we choose it. The Lantern will be published three times each year, but in between our website is worth a visit: there are archived articles and case histories, and The Lantern Riddle, the winner receiving one free yearly subscription. Visit www.the lantern.com.au
