Book review (Margaret Lock's East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan) Essay

Book review (Margaret Lock's East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan) - Essay Example ionism in the pluralistic medical systems in Japan and inspire the readers to borrow the holistic approach from the East Asian medicine and reevaluate the cultural biases of biomedicine. Although I highly appreciate Lock’s work, I will review this ethnography with a critical eye. There are two underlying assumptions concerning the study. Firstly, the book attempted to map a larger picture of the East Asian medicine in Japan from the eighth century to the late twentieth century, in which East Asian medicine was seen as Chinese medicine in Japan. The Japanese term Kanpo, literally, â€Å"Chinese method,† was thought to be a medical system learned from China, maintaining its Chinese flavor over 1300 years in Japan. Secondly, Lock assumed that the actual interviews that include only 50 Kyoto families, 2 schools, 8 herbal pharmacies, and dozens of patients and practitioners can represent the Japanese people’s thoughts concerning the practices of a pluralistic medicine in the 1970s in an urban setting in Japan. The samples are not considered large enough to draw up generalizations and to make assumption regarding a whole urban population. The ancient capital of Kyoto is also assumed to be representative as a model of a modern city in Japan. Based on these assumptions, Lock analyzed the East Asian medicine from three perspectives. Firstly, she uses a historical approach to analyze the classic Chinese medical works as the theories of East Asian medicine in a pre-industrialized Japan. The Japanese cultural ethos is analyzed as a less important force compared to the Chinese philosophies and Buddhist thoughts. Secondly, she uses a cultural anthropological approach to analyze her limited interviews and case studies in Kyoto to represente an issue of the adopting the East Asian medicine. Except for Tokyo and Osaka, other major Japanese cities other than Kyoto are barely mentioned. Thirdly, she used a critical anthropological approach to analyze the East Asian

Basic Principles of Accounting Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Basic Principles of Accounting - Essay Example The convention states that items recorded in financial statements should be recorded at the original cost for which it would be bought. Stating furniture at the present cost will be misleading and the account will not conform to legal standards. 3. Depreciation is an attempt to measure the worth of a fixed asset that was used in the period under review. It therefore divides the useful life of a given fixed asset into a number of years. Each year, there is an estimate of the worth of the asset that was used in the production process. This way, accountants can get close to getting the true picture of how much was spent in a given year. Accumulated depreciation represents the worth of the asset deducted in the previous years that the asset was used in production. 4. The payment of $20,000 in June 2008 is cannot be put in the income statement of 2007/2008. This is because that insurance payment added no value to production in the 2007/08 year. However, that payment gives your company the right to future benefits. In other words, it is an asset and it must be accounted for in the Balance Sheet as an Accrual. 5. Gross profit represents sales less cost of sales or direct cots. Net profit is gross profit less other production costs like overheads, indirect costs, as well as taxation. Net profit is important as it gives the whole view of trading activities in the company over a period of time. Gross profit just gives a shallow indication of events in the organization. 1. Direct cost is a cost directly attributable to a project or activity in a business. Indirect costs are activities that cannot be directly attributed to a single activity or process in the business. Manufacturing overheads is an indirect cost because it relates to the factory’s cost that cannot be identified with a single product or activity. Examples include electricity and depreciation costs. 2. Work in progress refers to costs of unfinished raw materials that are