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More Foreign Students Keen on Traditional Chinese Medicine
A golden-haired blue-eyed foreign girl skillfully treated a patient using acupuncture needles in one of the rooms in the clinic of the first affiliated hospital of Tianjin Chinese Medical College.
The girl was from Lithuania and has been in China for two years. She was doing clinical practice under the instruction of her Chinese medicine teacher.
More and more students from the West, like the Lithuanian girl, come to China to learn Chinese medicine.
Being the earliest and also sole base for foreigners to learn how to use Chinese medicine, the Ministry of Culture, the Medical College of International Studies for Chinese Medicine in Tianjin recruits 400 foreign students every year from Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia. Its affiliated hospital, the largest Chinese medicine hospital in north China, has received a total of 1,365 foreign students from 42 countries and 2,800 visitors from medical organizations in 29 countries.
"Previously, foreign students mainly came from countries in Asia, but now an increasing number of westerners are attracted by the magic power of Chinese medicine," Xu Li, associate professor at the hospital said.
Since there has been in depth Sino-foreign cultural exchanges, Chinese traditional medicine has been accepted and taught to more people from different countries. In medical colleges in the United States, two-thirds of the students choose Chinese medicine as their electives.
A few Chinese therapies like acupuncture have been acknowledged and have been given permission to practice in many regions in the United States and Canada. Local medical insurance programs also admit the validity of these forms of Chinese therapy. North America has become the largest overseas region where Chinese medicine is being administered.
In Europe, many countries such as Great Britain, France and Germany have legalized four-year higher learning in Chinese medicine in their medical colleges and quite a lot of Chinese clinics are in operation there.
To guarantee foreign students to meet the educational standards as required when they study in China, they must pass a nationwide general test before being granted relevant academic credentials issued by the ministries of public health and education. In recent years, all the foreign students studying traditional Chinese medicine have got the credentials.
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