Emily S. Wu is a college instructor in the San Francisco Bay area and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Asian religions and cultures. Her current research primarily focuses on Chinese and Chinese American religious practices and beliefs that intersect with medicine, healing, and understandings of the human body.

• PrefacePersonal BeginningIntroductionChapter 1: ContextualizationChapter 2: History of Local TCMChapter 3: Medical Training and Identity FormationChapter 4: TCM Healers in the Chinese CommunityChapter 5: TCM as Complementary MedicineChapter 6: TCM as Alternative MedicineChapter 7: Creating a Space for Psychic HealingChapter 8: Going to the Culturally AuthenticChapter 9: Environmentalism and Lifestyle ChangesChapter 10: The Happenings in an Acupuncture ClinicChapter 11: The Embodied Spirituality of QiChapter 12: Ideal Body and the Concept of HealthChapter 13: Concluding Analysis

Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States is an insightful and captivating ethnography of Chinese medicine practitioners in the San Francisco Bay area, one that reveals their socialization as students and experiences as clinicians into a world where East meets West perhaps more so than in any place in the United States. Religious studies scholar Emily S. Wu has written a masterful cultural interpretive or phenomenological examination of both Asian American and European American practitioners who have sought to adapt the psychic, spiritual, cultural, and environmental insights of an ancient medical tradition to a post-modern society where many people have sought meaningful alternatives or complements to Western biomedicine which all too still remains reductionist in its treatment of illness and the healing of the body politic. Her book makes an important contribution to the study of medical pluralism and complementary and alternative medical systems in American society.