Dr Lim Chee Han

The Practical Realities of Well-Being

Even though biomedicine (or western medicine) has become the dominant healthcare system in the world, communities continue to practice alternative medicines. Unequal distribution of healthcare goods coupled with the durability of healthcare cultures has led to the exclusion of communities from public healthcare, unregulated medical services, and risky self-medication behaviors that not only threatens people’s lives, but also violates our sense of justice. Our objective is to investigate communal healthcare practices in Singapore, interpret communities’ medical realities, analyze the country’s healthcare system, and provide sustainable solutions to the challenges that people face in caring-for-themselves.

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What is "Well-Being"?

This IEx includes any projects that deal with a general understanding of "well-being". In this IEx, "health", a taken-for-granted term that we use in everyday lives, in policies, and in legislatures, does not merely refer to a medical object, but of a sense of psycho-spiritual-bodily ease with which one exists with and in the world. The demarcation of "medicine" from other domains of knowledge like religion, sports, emotions, etc. is a fairly recent invention; shamans after all, were not only physicians, but also ritual masters, advisors, spirit mediums, etc.

Modernity has the habit of fragmenting reality: we now have more professions, identities, values, etc. to reckon with, compared to our prehistoric, feudal, and even industrial predecessors. Well-being too, has become fragmented into physical, mental, spiritual types, each with their respective professions, professionals, and industries: psychiatry, medicine, and religion. In this IEx, we shall go beyond such artificial distinctions to look at humans as we originally were: social-cultural subjects attuned to our primordial surroundings, but are now struggling to feel at ease in environments that were not designed for our instincts. If "health" refers to an attunement to our environments, how do we go about removing the dis from disease? The answer cannot simply lie with the field of medicine that only addresses the tangible part of the human person; we are more than our bodies. 

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Potential topics

To this end, topics that could be explored in this IEx include the following: 

1. Ethnomedicine (i.e. alternative medicine)

2. Meditative arts

3. Medical ethics

4. Mental health

5. Existential dread

6. Pain and suffering

7. Healthcare commodification

8. Healthcare distribution

9. Healthcare technologies

10. Health insurance

11. Health and life-course

12. Population health

13. Self-medication

14. etc. etc. etc.

You are most welcome to leave me a message to discuss your ideas. 

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About me

I'm known as a medical anthropologist within the academic circles, but I consider myself a jack of many trades. I've written an honour's thesis on existentialism and morality, a master's on organ transplantation, and a PhD's on qigong. I've also published and presented on religious cults, cognitive linguistics, political ideologies, higher order thinking skills, and experiential learning.  In all, I am fascinated by fundamental issues of human existence, from questions about life after death, to violence and civilization, to artificial intelligence, to films and aesthetic, to craftsmanship, education, and many more. In fact, it'll be hard to find something that I am not curious about and thus know a little about (I even taught myself how to code a token and launched it on Binance chain. So proud.), so bring it on in your IEx proposals. 

Before joining NUS College, I spent 9 years with the Singapore University of Social Sciences, teaching courses on social research and cultural diversity, eventually working my way up to become the head of programme for Overseas Experiential Learning, and finally, Global Readiness. Before that, I spent three years as a post-doctoral research fellow at Nanyang Technological University with the Division of Sociology, and before that, as a visiting scholar in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford, and before that, did my PhD at the Australian National University, and before that, a bachelor's and a master's at NUS FASS, during which I also tutored sociology courses to undergraduates, and before that, like many of you Singaporean young men, I was running around in the tropical rainforest brandishing an unloaded rifle. It would thus be apt to call my appointment at NUS College, a homecoming.  

I am also obsessed with the martial arts, having practised several styles over the past 30 years, eventually creating my own best suited to my constitution, that I teach on a multi-storey carpark somewhere in Jurong. I also play the guitar; just like many of my contemporaries, we thought that our rock band would last forever. It endured 3 years. I don't even know the whereabouts of one of my former band mates. 

Finally, I'm married with 5 year-old and 6-month old sons. And my wife is with the IEx team too. You'll see her around. 

I'll see you around too. 

AY23/24 Projects

AY24/25 Projects (Ongoing)