Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies
www.pharmpress.com/fact
Focus Alternat Complement Ther©2005 Pharmaceutical Press
Focus Altern Complement Ther 2002; 7: 232
Ted Kaptchuk grew up in the Brooklyn area of New York, USA, in the home of Jewish refugees that had arrived after World War II. After a turbulent period in the 1960s, Ted spent 5 years in China learning its traditional medicine. Some 10 years ago, Ted was invited to join the Harvard Medical School faculty because of his scholarly and clinical work in East Asian medicine. His recruitment was an early sign of what was to become biomedicine’s extensive re-evaluation of unconventional medicine. He quickly established his reputation as an insightful commentator across the entire field of alternative medicine. More interestingly, Ted has used his ‘perch’ at Harvard Medical School to become an ‘observer–participant’ to examine critically biomedicine itself. He is actively involved in clinical trials and studying their epistemological implications from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. Ted is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and is serving a term on the National Advisory Council of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Somehow, despite these and other titles of official acceptability, Ted still manages to maintain a rebellious and heretical attitude.
Q Who was your most influential teacher?
TK: An Auschwitz survivor who ran the infirmary in the camp. He taught me what one aspirin dissolved in a pail of water can do for several-hundred people.
Q If you had not entered your current profession, what would you have liked to do?
TK: Study religion, anthropology or history. In some way, I actually do study these topics in the context of healing and medicine.
Q What is the greatest danger to CAM?
TK: Lack of humour.
Q What does your mother-in-law think about you working in CAM?
TK: Similar to what she thinks of me – slight mistrust but getting more supportive.
Q What advice would you give to someone going into complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)?
TK: Be clear on the goals: clinical care, research, scholarly pursuits. If it’s clinical care, remember that the bottom line is caring for the patients … don’t get defensive about whether whatever you do ‘works’. Just do a compassionate job, the rest will follow. If it’s research … learn to do it squeaky clean. Again, don’t be defensive. If it’s scholarly, do it well. If you need a mix, figure ways to do it.
Q What stimulates your creativity?
TK: I enjoy being critical and iconoclastic.
Q What makes a good researcher?
TK: Putting the passion in a separate compartment using it to drive another compartment that is dispassionate and willing to be proven wrong (actually enjoying the experience of finding out that one’s beliefs are actually wrong …).
Q What depresses you?
TK: Too many meetings, administrative work, details that aren’t intellectual.
Q What is your biggest regret?
TK: Should have learned statistics better. I think there is a need for critical theory in statistics. I may still remedy this.
Q What do you deplore in yourself?
TK: Not listening to people deeply enough.
Q What do you deplore in others?
TK: Double standards.
Q If you were invited on the Jerry Springer show, why would this be?
TK: Please forgive me … I don’t do popular culture that well, I don’t know who Jerry Springer is.
