APR-A-2
THE MEETING WITH THE NANHUA UNIVERSITY
PRESIDENT AND THE TAIWANESE MINISTER OF HEALTH
IN THE SUPPORT FOR THE NATURAL HEALING
SCIENCE GRADUATE PROGRAM
April 1, 2004
Today was a full court diplomatic press, in which I was a bemused but somehow centerstage point man in a reception for the Minster of Education and the Minister of Health for the whole of the Taiwanese nation who were coming to Nanhua today from a flight from Taipei at the request of the Nanhua University President to showcase the rapid development of the Management College with which he started five years ago, and the University over which he presides today in its rapid growth phase spearheaded by its premier program, the Natural Healing Science Department. This is first of its kind in Taiwan and probably in all the Far East, and if there is ever anything that they could characterize as their own indigenous “science” it is the blend in integration of the healing arts and their traditional Chinese herbal, medical and acupuncture practices.
I am open minded about many of the traditional methods of helping people which have stood through some time, although most all of their outcomes are based not in evidence except for testimonials. It is that part of the ”science” of natural healing science that needs proving before wide spectrum endorsements of any and all “cures”. Along the way, some charlatanism is surely to take a ride, and I keep warily looking askance at the new requirements for heavy equipment for infrared radiation and colonic hydrotherapy and a “He-Ne Blood irradiator which strikes me to be as unproven quackery as this chelation fad. But, one of the participants in this program is a fellow from DC who is founder of the CUIM (“Capital University of Integrative Medicine”) who is coming from a European vacation first class, since he has made a lot of money in spa treatment of—cancer—among other things, and in settings such as in Tijuana fifteen minutes from the International border where he had formerly led the fight to legalize Laetrile and has a “naturopath” license in DC.
He is allegedly housed on the campus of Georgetown University, but I never heard of him as “Professor of Medicine” in circulation around other countries who have been more excited about his patented machines and medicines sold to those who might most benefit from treatments for which there either is no disease or successful treatment (fibromyalgia, MS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and many cancers which may or may not have treatments foregone or at least pauperized by a new five billion dollar industry.) The fellow’s name is Bradford, and he has done very well indeed. His patented machines for scanning for such things as energy fields etc seem to bear his name and he has become quite wealthy, so that he has founded a “non-profit” naturopathy school which Georgetown has allegedly sheltered, although much of his money comes from the spa settings of his “clinics” in Southern California, of course. So, it may be just as well that I am here as the bellwether credentialed practitioner in their support of a serious department to investigate this in the setting of the Chinese practice rather than the purveyor of expensive equipment for cleaning out colons who also runs a magazine called “Choice” using the 1994 law passed by Congress that herbal nostrums and other traditional therapies do not need FDA approval.
The President of the University was the one presiding over my hypothyroidism talk and heard my statement every other paragraph that we needed evidence in measurements to back up any claims of efficacy other than desperate peoples’ willingness to pay for or testify in favor of something that they think may help them. The Education Minster and health minister are interested in me since I seem to be both credentialed and credible, and above all perhaps, that I do not seem to be engaged in the “trade” getting very well off on the problems people present to the Southern California kind of “Choice” practitioners proud that they are “alternative” to most things rational. That is not the case with most hard-working Chinese peasants who have been using the kinds of treatments I am more interested in than irradiating blood in extracorporeal circuits with de-toxifying rays.
I packaged up the “book” that they had printed about me by searching the Web and other net-based sources to pack together a big color covered book that is a proud heirloom to furnish to the Grandkids when they someday ask:” What is it that Granddaddy did in the war?” I added the notes and special features of the Nanhua University, including a CD on the institution and a series of notices about the International Conference, of which I have so far been the first two-thirds. The huge color posters hanging all around are objets d’ arts that I would like to have in at least one or more copies to hang as “modern art museum” posters. I will see if at the end of next week’s conferences I can carry back a sample or two.
AN “INTEGRATIVE” ART OF MY OWN:
I AM SLOWLY BEING DRAWN INTO THE DIGITAL
AGE
AND CAUTIOUSLY JOINING THE NEW
MILLENNIUM
The best thing to happen to me by far so far today, is that the one student who had wandered around the conference taking pictures had said he would give me a set of his digital pictures on a disc, especially since I had no functioning cameras only twenty four hours into the Taiwan two weeks. He also volunteered to put my slides on a disc, and I volunteered the fact that I had just come from a conference in which I had presented two lectures that badly needed to be digitized and put on disc. So, he took the two sets of slides I had presented during my extended conference the night before last, and had taken the second two carrousels from the talks I had just given in Tahoe, and came back with all four lectures on a single disc, with a fifth Chinese calligraphy glyph designating the album of photos he had taken during my lectures. Wonderful! I am only sorry I do not have the carousel of my Tropical Surgery slides which I have been trying hard to scan myself, but cannot retrieve them from the hard drive and I do not have a CD burner to store them in transfer out of the laptop.
Besides, the laptop had decided not to turn on for fifteen minutes during reputed tries today, so I wrote all the cover letters for the extensive mailing s I will try to send out from here long hand today, a step back further from digital to ballpoint. I hope that the laptop does not need to be replaced before my Amazon trip as it seems my cameras must be. If I have to do that I must then go through an extensive from-the-ground-up renovation of all my recording equipment on photojournalism, just after having made the investment in a from-the-ground-up renovation of my homebase—which is both finished and furnished in my absence, with no prospect of my moving in until I return in May from the Amazon trip. I will have jumped into the new millennium, even if four years late, cutting the cord of paper and film and ink and postage stamps all in one trip that has had a cumulative cascade of technologic meltdowns!
RECEPTION, PRESENTATIONS TO, AND LUNCH
WITH THE
ADMINISTRATION AND MINISTRIES
The group gathered outside the administration building to await the special big bus carrying the ministers from the Chiayi airport and they arrived late enough for me to hear from a number of the protocol officers around here that I am taking a part of this “ancestors’ weekend” as a holiday myself. I am leaving on Saturday to see the local Chiayi Museum, which looks like a series of Buddhist temples with statues outside in gardens which I have viewed from the road in passing. I will also take off at Five o’clock AM on Sunday to go back up to the mountains of Ali Shan, but not to the same place as we had gone before to climb the mountain and see the indigenous tribe’s cultural dance program. The next trip there will be to help the development of a sub-branch of Nanhua University which we saw from the indigenous representative who came to the conference to present to the group of the Ministers and to the President the fancy Power Point presentation on the plot they have developed on a map of the4 steep mountain terrain projected on a map with a ten meter relief map and some rather nice facilities on the plot.
The home base here of Nanhua University is developing rapidly and has acquired adjacent farmland on which they will begin building the stadium I saw on their plans. The Jungle University which has no gated walls since it does not need them with the “impenetrable jungle of bamboo forest behind and around it” will shortly have a waterway moat for its perimeter after the additional construction is completed. It is already a rather pretty campus, isolated in the middle of small mountains along limited access roads winding among small village farmlands of pineapples and steep hillside bamboo forests with some sugar cane along the slopes. I think the University President has done a remarkable job here at Nanhua, starting off from a College of Management Since, and within his five years here, having a University with a bellwether program in Natural Healing Science as his advertising bragging point, but an expanded campus and an additional branch facility.
Consider what Trachtenberg has done at GWU—building the land-locked real estate of the DC downtown Campus as far as he can with the construction of the Health and Wellness Center and additional dormitories, then the spectacular ornamental “Gates” –such as my “Professor’s Gate”—as landscaping of the urban university (compare that with the “moating” of the waterways here) then acquiring other campuses like the Mount Vernon College and the start up of the Ashburn Fauquier County George Washington University Virginia Campus (compare to the Ali Shan campus here)—and these two presidents are members of the same school of management science and edifice complex construction.
I sat in the international conference room in which I had given my opening lectures and listened as and each could make some comments. It is almost comical to listen to a five-tonal language without understanding it, since a lot of the phrases used are exactly like “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” I can distinguish some words by their inflection, but the meaning is dependent upon the inflection not the emotional content of it as would be the case in English, nor the rising tone of a question mark at sentence’s end. A number of references were made to me and a lot of bowing and hand gestures of respect were exchanged—a pattern I recalled later when at the restaurant, each participant toasted each of the other participants, individually, and as a group, singly, then repeatedly, so that the ceremony took just as long as the dining.
The dining was very good, with a variety of dishes placed on the revolving lazy Susan in the middle of the table and several soup courses, with chopped up fish, squid and various other sea life that lost recognition after it had been disassembled. A large carp was lying in a bed of vegetations and several organ meats were served, despite the presence of several Buddhists whom I would presume to be vegetarian. The Minister of Education sat near me, and we quickly found out that he had spent some time in both San Diego and San Antonio, where, of course I pointed out that my son was on the UTHSCSA faculty. We turned the rotating table around several times as we sampled from each with fruits in the later servings, and repeated toasts, which I learned were of sparkling grape juice, so that the party could go back to work. At the departure ceremony, the Ministers and their attendants got back into the fancy tour bus that had been rented and which took us to the restaurant in town as I sat with the Minister of Education and Yuth Nimit made his pitch for the PhD graduate program accreditation on an urgent basis. With a few brief words about the competitive advantage about being first, the deal was done. The Nanhua University President is ecstatic. The many bows and waves with which they set off to get to their chartered aircraft to return them to the capital at Taipei (this is a long way out into the hinterlands, a voyage they would never have made simply to inspect the plans for the new branch of Nanhua at Ali Shan were it not used as the excuse the President had engineered to get them here to hear about the Natural Healing Program—and get the nod for the further graduate accreditation of its expansion to a PhD program.) We got into the limo that the University driver had driven to lead us to the restaurant, and the president insisted that he sit in the front seat as Nimit and I were in the back. The other university accompanying persons took two cabs back to the school.
Throughout, I note that standing on protocol is a big thing here. It is not at all an accident that one person sits next to another nor on which side they sit. It is also a matter of precedence, and that I always hold back, and the President or someone else brings me up to front and center. At least part of this is on the basis of respect for my age, and my status as visiting professor. But, who gets into or out of an elevator first is not a matter of chivalry, since I keep trying to let women out first, and particularly young women are not to have precedence over an “old man!” I am humored by it all since unlike the same kind of concerns in an environment in which it might make a difference to me, the stakes are so small. When the gathering of the ministers and the university officials took place out in front of the plaza where the drummers were performing their oriental rhythms and dance around their instruments, I thought this would be a great opportunity for a “:Photo Op.” The woman from the President ‘s office who is the chief Protocol Officer had in her hand the Nikon CoolPix I had been looking oat in the catalogs, and motioned to her that it would be a good picture, but hat I had no camera that was working. She then looked at me with a beseeching expression, and I took the arm of the Minister of Education and the President, and we posed in front of the drummers in performance. Suddenly a whole forest of cameras leafed out from the branches of the group around us, san each was reluctant to suggest or to interfere, but once they were seeing that we were collaborating and not being ordered into “Photo Op Mode” they continued taking the pictures after we had done with our posing. The chief protocol officer thanked me, saying she was eager to have such a picture but did not know how she might suggest it. It takes an American to break down the inhibitions of a protocol impasse!