Research

Research is a specialist area recognised by the Chinese Medicine Council of New Zealand, listed alongside clinical areas such as pain. The work is not confined to the consulting room.

This page is a public editorial note. It does not report findings or offer treatment advice.

What Chinese medicine research is for

Chinese medicine has been practised through long traditions of observation, commentary, teaching and clinical experience. Research is another way to examine and communicate that knowledge. Its purpose is not to demonstrate that a treatment works, but to ask how knowledge in Chinese medicine can be documented, taught, scrutinised and understood in a contemporary health setting.

For the public this matters because knowledge that can be examined can be taught, discussed across professions, and made intelligible to people who do not share one cultural starting point. The work aims at safer practice and at evidence-informed discussion — evidence as something that can be checked, not as a claim that the medicine has already been settled.

What the research includes

The field includes several overlapping kinds of inquiry. Classical literature and theory ask how the body, the seasons and illness were written as a teachable system. Clinical inquiry asks what can be observed and recorded in practice. Laboratory and mechanism studies ask questions of identification, quality and safety that experiment can address — this page does not report those results. Education and the health system ask how the medicine is taught, regulated, and described so other professions can see it.

From the classics to regulation

Early scholarship sat with the classical texts and the commentarial traditions that organised them: how a medical framework could be transmitted. In the modern period, colleges, textbooks, examinations and standards sat beside that older scholarship. Contact with biomedical methods raised a further question: how traditional concepts should be described when another intellectual framework is in use. Those questions now continue under professional regulation, where quality, safety and accountability belong to the setting of the work, not to a list of findings.

What the research asks now

Contemporary research still begins with questions. How can herbal materials be identified and monitored in a regulated environment? How can questions that arise from Chinese medicine be investigated with biomedical methods without being stripped of their clinical and theoretical setting? How can practice and professional knowledge be described clearly enough to be considered inside a wider health system?

Chinese medicine research in Aotearoa New Zealand

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Research is a specialist area recognised by the Chinese Medicine Council of New Zealand. Named published work — cited here only as existing, not for its results — includes Patel and Standen (2014, *New Zealand Medical Journal*) on use of an Auckland student acupuncture clinic, and Patel and Toossi (2016, same journal) on practising in New Zealand compared with China; both list the New Zealand College of Chinese Medicine among the authors’ affiliations. Debra Betts (Wellington, 2004) reported an observational study of prebirth acupuncture in 169 women; public biographical notes list Research among her CMCNZ specialist areas.

On this site, Dr. Chien-kuo Shih has taught at NZCCM, taken part in the 2025 Oceania Chinese medicine forum in Auckland, and leads the course recorded as Four-session course: Five Movements and Six Qi.

Chinese Medicine Specialists Group keeps a public record of specialist work. It is not a clinical-trial institution.

One example: literature and cultural studies

One example is the literature and cultural studies of Dr. Chien-kuo Shih (矢建国). His Chinese medicine doctorate was supervised by Professor Lai Xinsheng (赖新生). The six volumes are organised around Heaven, Human and Earth. The literary line includes *Tianren Zhongyi* (《天人中医》), *Yi Dao Yi Yi* (《易道医义》) and the *Nan Jing* (《难经》). The cultural line includes Neo-Confucian study and architecture. Earth, here, is only the brief link between that architecture and traditional siting and fengshui — not a third essay on the geomancy titles.

In this example the work is the reading of texts and traditions, not laboratory measurement.