Most of our authors are scholars, many have academic positions. Thus they are, and have been, very productive contributors to the academic literature of our field. What was called “The Term Debate” was two-sided. On one side we have events like Dr. Daniel Bensky’s comment that Chinese medicine has no terminology and Elsevier’s publication of Foundation of Chinese Medicine, a textbook with a very small gloss. On the other, we have Nigel Wiseman and Paul Unschuld’s research and their dictionaries describing thousands of concepts with historically fixed definitions in the Chinese language.

Who won the debate? It depends on your criteria. There is essential no Chinese or western scholarship that does not recognize that Chinese medicine has a large and sophisticated conceptual foundation and thus a rich terminology. Yet, commercially, student texts are the “cash cow” of the business. These generally adhere to the idea that except for a small set of concepts, you can understand and practice Chinese medicine based on the meaning of similar western notions.

If you would like to explore this historical material, A Guided Tour of the Term Debate explains the history and provides further links.