Enthusiasm and passion are qualities often seen as being supportive to achieving goals and explaining ideas. Increased interest in any subject manner boosts people’s engagement level when speaking to others and often makes their message richer with details and personal insights. Zeal commonly has an interdependent relationship with a person’s beliefs and behaviors. Extreme enthusiasm can correlate with having a more defined belief system, yielding self-affirming behaviors and a use of language that reinforces faith in defined ideas. When this narrows tolerance for other ideas that may challenge those established, fanaticism can limit people’s discourse on any subject in view. Defensive arguments, judgments, and blind faith can grow while a person clings to their ideas as being infallible and integral to their perception of self-identity.
In the context of an inter-professional health care team, there is fanaticism in both the conventional and alternative communities. Fanaticism reinforces independence, which can be counter-productive to collaboration and the exchange of ideas from all members of the team. For acupuncturists interested in integration, I’m not sure if there’s clarity that we are even included yet on the “team†by the conventional medical community to reputably participate in the exchange of ideas and potentially be heard by their members.
As the position to have acupuncture firmly instated into our modern health care system is gaining traction, the focus seems to be about growing the amount of evidence in the form of data to carry the decision into common acceptance. However, for fanatics on both the conventional and alternative sides whose belief systems may be influencing their critical analysis of the efficacy of acupuncture, maintaining an impartial and inclusive perspective in our language and actions will be helpful to build bridges towards the open-mindedness that will be required, despite meeting the undefined threshold for a conclusive amount of data.