Acculturating the Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Culture-Centered Study of Chinese International Students’ Idealization of Medical Integration during Sojourns

ABSTRACT

To better understand the Chinese international students’ barrier to the U.S. health and medical system, this study investigates the students’ understandings of Traditional Chinese medicines during their sojourns in the United States. Holding that medicine is cultural/culture, the culture-centered in-depth interviews (n = 23) help understand the Chinese international students’ acculturation of the two medicines after their arrival in the new medical culture. The analyses focus on the rhetorical nature of medical acculturation: even though the students actually assimilate Traditional Chinese medicine, they claim to integrate the two. The results indicate how integration has been idealized and imposed as the only acceptable medical acculturation strategy for international students. The findings also suggest that medical integration has been used as a disguising cloak of medical assimilation and therefore, immigrants’ integration and acculturation should be carefully examined in health contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• integration
• medical acculturation
• medical systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Yadong Ji

Yadong Ji holds an M.A. from Zhejiang University and is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. He has several publications in the areas of health communication and intercultural communication. He also has presented numerous papers at national and international communication conferences regarding health persuasion, acculturation, and health communication across cultures. He is also a teaching assistant at Ohio University, lecturing on persuasive communication and research methods.