Pathways through the border of biomedicine and traditional chinese medicine: a meeting of medical systems in a Japanese psychiatry department.

This article examines a meeting of biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the context of a psychiatry department in a Japanese national medical school. The meeting is explored through stories of four individuals, the professor of the department and three Chinese physicians studying as exchange students. Global structures of medical authority are revealed in the way each participant follows a different trajectory through this space, positioning themselves by virtue of the medical epistemologies they embody. The particular geography of this meeting between systems allowed for a productive synthesis of diagnostic techniques, quite different from the more common therapeutic syntheses. This synthesis is particularly important for contemporary psychiatry because of its ability to attend to dimensional as opposed to categorical aspects of mental health.