What was the Council of Oriental Medical Publishers and why did Paradigm Publications support their efforts?
During the height of the Term Debate there were a number of meeting held to develop a way to label publisher’s standards for translation such that readers would know how their materials were prepared. There is a description of these proposals here. This lead to the formation of C.O.M.P., the Council of Oriental Medical Publishers, as a group of writers and publishers who accept the importance of labeling the sources of information in books, articles and multimedia products that make claims about acupuncture, Chinese medicine, massage therapy, and other healing traditions from East Asia.
Put bluntly—and over simply—there are two schools of thought about East Asian medicine. Some believe that East Asian healing arts like Chinese Medicine are “fuzzy.” They propose that these arts contain so many multiple meanings and imprecise concepts that practitioners for whom personal clinical experience is the unique or primary source of understanding must interpret the information for English-speaking readers. Thus, they believe Chinese medicine is conceptually small enough that it can be transmitted by individuals without reference to publicly-available Chinese medical dictionaries. In essence these writers believe Chinese medical concepts need not be preserved in translation. For a detailed view of these matters please see our References section of the Resources page.
Our editorial policies are founded on a different view of East Asian healing traditions. We perceive them to be a complex, multi-generational arts to which literally thousands of people have made important contributions. We believe they contain sophisticated concepts that will be routinely misunderstood if represented by simplistic, English expressions. The source of an idea must be known if clinicians are to judge its utility for their own practices.
It is not that we doubt the value of clinical experience—our translation teams always include senior Asian clinicians, often the originators of the information. To the contrary, we believe the clinical experience available in Chinese and Japanese is so valuable that the effort to transmit it in English deserves the scrutiny and contributions of many, and honoring concepts by recognizing their establish Chinese-language meaning.
For us then, C.O.M.P. was both a reader service and a public responsibility. This does not imply that there is no role for personal exposition and opinion about Chinese medicine, or that there is no need for books that summarize or abbreviate traditional Asian medical concepts for readers who will not apply them clinically, for students early in their learning careers, or to familiarize conventional Western medical practitioners. It means only that we believe that Asian writers should be given a real chance to be heard and understood in their own voice. Further reading about these issues is available on our References section of our Resources page.
Why did C.O.M.P. Fail?
Economic power is the short and most accurate answer. The arrival of multi-billion dollar publishing firms in the Chinese medicine markets ended any possibility of C.O.M.P. Labels on textbooks would have required releasing information about how books were prepared, what standards were applied, and how those standards were implemented. This would have limited the marketing claims that could be made. When these books began to dominate the so-called “exam texts,” any chance for public standards was lost.