Biomedicine: A Textbook for Practitioners of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine
Book Review: Biomedicine by Bruce Robinson, M.D. By Elliott Freed, L.Ac.               We have entered a period of great expansion of medical knowledge and competition between different schools of thought and practice.  Many voices clamor for an audience.  Some of us sit in our private practices hoping to educate our friends and neighbors about our way of practicing.  Some of us seek to popularize one school or another.  Others of us seek to be seen as experts by our colleagues within our school or our colleagues from other schools. Within this great colliding of egos, ideas and individual realities, there is a promising current. As the predominant medical model of our time and place seems to be suffering the fate of fragmentation inherent in its core ideology, many are asking important questions.  What will become of our current model?  What new model will arise?  Will we have clashing paradigms forever, will one or another win out, or will there be a merging?             In his new book, Biomedicine: A Textbook for Practitioners of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine, Dr. Bruce Robinson dives into this melee.  This book is really two books in one.  It is a simple textbook meant to introduce the ideas and practice of biomedicine to acupuncturists.  It does this admirably with a clear, easily accessible layout, a great deal of useful information and a gentle touch.  It also is a rap session about the current state of medicine in this country.  As such it is infused with philosophy, social observation and critique, a personal, thoughtful voice and an occasional touch of humor.             As a textbook this is a wonderful source of information.  It is divided into sections based on categories of disease.  Each section has a few chapters of introduction that clearly lay the groundwork needed to understand specific diseases discussed in that section.  The introductory chapters are followed by descriptions of individual diseases.  These descriptions include signs and s --By Elliott Freed, L.Ac. For the California Journal of Oriental Medicine