Journey To The West: an acupuncture documentary

A new ground-breaking documentary tracing Chinese medicine’s journey to the UK is currently on its festival run and now available for screenings.

Just a few weeks ago Jonquil Westwood Pinto caught up with writer and producer Sibyl Coldham to learn more about the project and how it came about

JWP: Tell me a bit about yourself and how you got into the world of Chinese medicine (CM)

SC: I qualified as a secondary school teacher in Australia in the mid 1970s, and after a few years travelling, settled in London with Tony Brewer, one of the founders of the London School of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine – a mouthful of a name, but the ‘TCM’ was important. They’d all been to China and were bowled over by the clinical experience they gained there. They wanted to set up a college here that got as close as possible to replicating that experience. And, oddly, that’s where I came in. They knew their acupuncture, but they didn't know much about learning and teaching. I grew fascinated with the double complexity of teaching something that came from a different culture. I joined the course so that I could use the topics and problems in the syllabus to frame thinking about how people learn. And so I became a teacher-educator, and that has been my role ever since.

JWP: The film was funded by the TCM Development Trust – what is that and how did you get involved?

SC: The Trust was a fund set up by the London School of Acupuncture (LSA). The School was a not-for-profit company, and so we needed the fund to house our profits. In 1997 the LSA school joined the University of

Westminster, and so the University funded research projects, conferences and other staff development. We had funds, but were struggling to see how we could use them to make a difference for CM.

JWP: How did the idea for the film come about?

SC: When I became a trustee we were struggling as to how best to use the funds. And also, over the years we – my fellow trustees and I – had seen how difficult it is to do anything impactful, and we were looking around for a different kind of project. We also needed a partner who could actually take on a project and see it through.

That’s where the idea for a film came from. My niece, Zoe, who is a filmmaker was amazed by the really powerful stories coming out, but also about the sea of prejudice in the UK that washed around the edges of anything to do with acupuncture. She was struck by the difference from how things work in Australia, where in her experience acupuncture was a normal part of healthcare. Her enthusiasm and different perspective really brought home to us the need to capture our stories of those early days and what it had been like in the 1980s and ‘90s.

JWP: It’s such a complicated story – how did you work out the script?

SC: I began with drafting out the aspects of the profession that we needed to present – early years in the UK; the impact of courses in China in the 1970s and ‘80s; attempts to unify and establish as a medical profession. We wanted to include the story of how and why courses moved into or aligned with degree-level education, as well as the issues in research and the setbacks and prejudice that came along the way. Our aim was to juxtapose these stories with explaining key ideas in the CM medical model, so that one might build openness to understanding the other and vice versa. As you can see, we wanted the credibility of the people we filmed to speak to the credibility of the medical model.

JWP: How did you decide on who to interview?

SC: We looked for people who could tell these stories, and who could also cross over more than one aspect of the story so that we would be able to weave the narrative together. We wanted people who had led the way in developing professional, educational and research structures across time. But we also wanted to include the diversity that the profession encompasses now – both in terms of its membership and in the ways they practise and the different settings.

Jasmine Uddin

Jasmine Uddin was the obvious choice to talk about the struggle for statutory regulation, having led the way for that whole journey. We wanted Felicity Moir to talk about education as she has been involved from the early days and has been such a key person in taking acupuncture education forward, both in terms of establishing a practice-led curriculum but also for her work in developing the professional standards and accreditation.

Felicity Moir

We had hoped to include Hugh MacPherson to lead the research part of the story but sadly that was not possible. But we do have Mark Bovey, who was the BAcC’s research manager for many years, and to provide balance as well as a western medical perspective on the issues of researching CM, we have Mike Cummings from the British Medical Acupuncture Association (BMAS). He has also been involved in some of the NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) decisions and so he was helpful in explaining their approvals process.

And finally, we have Volker Scheid who, as well as being a medical anthropologist and CM herbalist, is one of the very few CM practitioners to have headed up a CM research centre in a UK university.

Interwoven with these key people we have four practitioners who work in diverse settings and take different approaches in their work – Yizhen Jia; Dominique Joire, who until recently was director of the Gateway Clinic; Simon Robey; and Rayrose Raymond.

Simon Robey

JWP: How did you come up with the name?

SC: Journey To The West is a Chinese classic, about a monk and his companions who go to India (the West from their point of view) to bring back Buddhist texts to China. The Chinese did this again in the early 1900s when they felt the West was more powerful with its scientific knowledge. They sent people to study. And, partly as a result of this self-imposed westernisation, they themselves changed and codified CM to align more readily with western medicine and invented TCM. Alongside this there is the journey of westerners going to China and bringing back various versions of acupuncture, then modifying and adapting them to the needs of this culture. Finally there is the latent prejudice that anything on a journey to the West in our current times has to carry. All in all, it seemed to capture everything we wanted.

JWP: In the film, you touch on some of the negative attitudes within UK culture towards CM simply because it is foreign and Chinese. Can you tell us why you wanted to include this?

SC: We needed to get into that space if we were to take the audience with us in understanding CM on its own terms. Prejudice is a mechanism that everyone is aware of – so we felt we could use it as a bridge into the idea that taking a different starting point (such as qi) is inevitably going to build a different model. And if you have a different model, maybe you then need to evidence it in a different way. We wanted to give a different context to the dismissiveness of those parts of the science community who will only accept one form of evidence – randomised controlled trials (RCTs). But the other reason for bringing it in was to challenge some of the blatant untruths that are circulated about CM’s use of endangered species, and conspiracy theories about the Chinese government. Volker is brilliant on both these points in the film.

JWP: How do you think the BAcC and UK acupuncturists in general should respond (if at all) to these public perceptions?

SC: I worked with acupuncturists in academic environments for 40 years, and I have seen how vitriolic and damaging the prejudice from some parts of the science community has been. Many people see this as a contributing factor in some of the university-based course closures. I can understand that this makes people hesitant to get into a debate, but I also think it shows what’s at stake if you don’t. There is always a way to challenge, and there is also always safety in numbers, so you need to build alliances across communities and national boundaries. The cornerstone of western scientific research is supposedly to be sure that you are comparing like with like, and that if you have a placebo, that it is inert – but these are two areas that the RCTs fall down on. I also think you need to build allies within areas of medicine that you know acupuncture works for, and to work towards widening insight into CM’s understanding of health and illness on your own terms.

JWP: You mentioned that courses within universities have been closed down. With the backdrop of wider crises in the university sector and NHS (funding gaps etc), what is the way forward in working with these institutions?

SC: As Felicity says in the film, ‘Where do we go from here?’ Personally, I think it is vital for the profession that there are university-based courses. The private colleges do a great job at training the next generation, and yes, some of these are connected to universities. But they can’t offer all the resources of a university, not least of which is the wider academic community, staff development and networking that goes with it. We need to have the professional development structures of master’s and PhD courses to have any chance of building the kind of research and research centres for CM that do the kinds of research that we want. Any of you who have tried to do a PhD will know how difficult it is when your academic community has no understanding of your main focus. I’m sure universities will look again soon at CM courses. They will be different, but this is a tremendously important route for building alliances.

JWP: What was the biggest challenge in making the film

SC: The editing process – this was the director’s responsibility rather than mine, but the challenge was to allow her to make her own film, at the same time as finding the line that would set out the complexity of the medical model and the other issues facing the profession in a way that would be engaging and approachable for audiences. Decisions as to what was important often depended on knowing the history and the context that the interviewee was talking from. There were also challenges in recognising new directions that emerged over the time of making the film.

We were ready to start interviewing in March 2020, in that first week of lockdown. But the delays also meant that new storylines gather strength. For example, we were able to include some of the response to Covid and the recent NICE decision to approve acupuncture for chronic pain.

JWP: What are you hoping the film will achieve?

SC: To open minds to the possibility of a different and equally valid way of understanding how our bodies work, in health and illness.

Within the profession, we hope to inspire the next generation to keep working towards CM achieving its rightful place in our healthcare, which necessarily will depend on a wider understanding of its underlying principles and insights.

JWP: What are your next steps with the film? How can we see it?

SC: The film is currently running the festival circuit and we hope to be able to announce some more screening opportunities in the new year. In November, we screened at the North East International Film Festival, Newcastle and the Essex DocFest which were both fabulous events. We are also in the process of securing distribution which would allow the film to be viewed by a larger and international audience. You can keep track of upcoming festival screening opportunities via the website and our social channels 〉

www.journeytothewestdocumentary.com www.instagram.com/journeytothewest_documentary/

JWP: What can BAcC members do to help promote the film?

SC: We want you all to watch the trailer and talk it up. Share the website and Instagram account with your friends and patients. Ask them all to watch the trailer, to send it on to their friends and networks, and, of course, to go along and see the film when it comes to a cinema nearby.