In 1977, I spent months for naming of the school for acupuncture. I wanted to have a name that contains and expresses spirits of Asian Medicine and Korean values; continual pursuing and devotion to achieve outstanding academic achievements.
Finally, a Chinese phrase came into my mind, 思優秀培一路. Korean reads the Chinese characters like ‘Sa Woo Soo Bay Il Lo’. It sounds like South Baylo in English and its meaning of combined Chinese characters could represent what I wanted to express best for express spirits of Asian Medicine and Korean values.
“Among the organs in the body, one always keeping on working is Yin organs. By contrast, Yang organs work as they need to.”
The phrases are from the first part of Cho, Hyunyoung’s(1902~1988) “Popular Asian Medicine”. I lectured my first acupuncture students 40 years ago and I used the book for the class textbook.
South Baylo was one of the first acupuncture school established in 1970’s. It seemed impossible to find right professors for English classes. Also, there were a few Asian Medicine textbooks written in English.
I decided to study Asian Medicine and taught students. Even, I only had experiences for lecturing Economics at colleges, and I was not an acupuncturist. But it seemed that there was no option. “Popular Asian Medicine” was one of Korean Medicine books used for class textbook. The author, Cho, Hyunyoung(1902~1988) well explained the Asian Medicine in Western medical point of view.
I wanted to translate all contents of “Popular Asian Medicine” in English by professors in Korean Medicine schools. I visited Kyunghee College of Korean Medicine, which the first established in Korea to educate acupuncturists and Korean Medicine, to offer a project to translation of the book. Unfortunately, the project failed.
5 years later of my project failed, many valuable Asian medical textbooks which were firstly published in Chinese then were translated in English by Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, were started to be imported in US.
All acupuncture schools in the U.S. started to use the books from China. Since then, people started calling Asian medicine as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Even, State of California officially used the term TCM for indication Asian medicine for long. That is history of introduction of a term, TCM in the US.
Still, many Americans believe TCM represents all Asian medicine even Korea and Japan also have been developing distinctive medical system respectively. I and community leaders from Japanese and Vietnamese filed complaints together to government asking to replace TCM to Oriental medicine.
Finally, state government announced that it was more proper to call Oriental Medicine instead of TCM because China was not only country practicing acupuncture and herbal medicine.
Everything has been changed. Acupuncture schools have more options for choosing textbooks and the schools have more chance for hiring professors for their Korean, Chinese, and English classes. Also, there was increasing number of South Baylo University alumni professors. And there were also increasing number of professors have Western medicine background and chiropractic degree at SBU.
Major trend in 21st century medical field is integrative medicine. In order to treat patient more efficiently, acupuncturists should work with other healthcare professionals. I have dream. One day, acupuncturists take major role in leading other healthcare professional groups in the US to provide better medical service.