TCM: Traditional Chinese Mendacity?

OK, time for some wrasslin'.

I just read a great article about Traditional Chinese Medicide (TCM): Do some harm – Traditional Chinese medicine is an odd, dangerous mix of sense and nonsense. Can it survive in modern China?. And it got me in the mood to do some pontificating.

I think TCM is pseudoscience and shouldn't be described as 'medicine'. It's a state-endorsed witchcraft and quackery of the highest order. The vast majority of it is  ; what is effective in TCM is researched and refined to become real medicine, and is much the better for it (e.g. bear bile in the article). The remainder is the palliative effect of talking to someone about problems and/or the placebo effect.

There is, of course, Traditional Western Medicine: bloodletting. This isn't a facetious comparison. Bloodletting had a whole philosophy/cosmology behind it (the humours), just like TCM. However, since bleeding and barber surgeons aren't couched in exotic/mysterious terms, and since we are generally scientifically literate, we pay it no heed. Why should we treat TCM any differently?

Pseudoscience does, of course, thrive in the west. (No evolution! Creationism! Young earth! Don't vaccinate my kids! Climate change is a liberal plot against Christmas!) But that doesn't make the defense of TCM any less wrong.

What do you think?

i think 5000years of trial and error has to be better than 100years of anti biotics

I think the same about TCM as I do about tea, skydiving and grizzly bear wrestling. If some people like it, no skin off my nose. I just don't do it. What I don't see the need for ever is to put on my jackboots and proceed to jump ferociously up and down on another country's culture. Is TCM going to become better because you find it to be similar to Medieval Western medicine? A lot of people believe in it and, if that makes them feel happy and healthy, then what does it matter if it does not appeal to me?

The polarization is interesting, and the need now to distinguish the traditions, "Western" and "Chinese". Reminds one of Creationism vs "Science", and the nifty trick the religious pull by placing their tradition in opposition. By opposing, they don't just oppose, they associate. By claiming to be equally as good, they set themselves up as high as their opponent without having even to demonstrate some intrinsic value.

I am a scientist by training.  I was of the "Chinese medicine is hogwash" camp until Chinese medicine fixed an issue I was having that Western medicine just did not have the capacity to fix.

Chinese medicine's development has been considerably scientific if you consider the times and the lack of standards.  5000 years of evidence is no small feat.  Needless to day, it does not meet today's western medicine standards. They didn't do double blind testing, or account for the placebo effect, and focuses on a person's chi/energy/other spiritual terminology.  There are no elaborate scientific records of their experimental activities for people to consult and scrutinize.

If there was enough of a push to conduct modern day clinical testing with Chinese medicine, I think that this debate would be over.  A few problems though: 1) clinical testing is extremely expensive.  The sheer number of participants and scientists required to test this many combinations of drugs is insane.  No one trusts testing out of China.  2) In order to be approved for clinical testing, you must have a sound scientific basis upon which your drug behaves.  There has been quite a bit of research into how these herbs work in the first place, but much is still left to be done.   3) The push for "natural alternatives" in the West has completely demolished the desire to create Westernized drugs out of the untested Chinese medicine.  Yes, China is doing it on their own, but China's own Western medical system is heavily biased towards Chinese medicine.  Just ask any doctor of western medicine working in China.

Can you imagine the sheer number of drugs that would finally be available and proven to work once this testing complete?  Chinese medicine would no longer be entirely blind when it comes down to the hogwash and the science.

Right now, I trust Chinese medicine to deal with the small things that Western medicine cannot fix or cannot fix without serious side effects (ie, death).  Anything that gets serious funding in research, I would trust Western science.  Nothing desperate, just hormone imbalances, the common cold/symptom reduction, chronic nosebleeds, etc.  The things that they would have had and known about without biopsies 2000 years ago.

Something to keep in mind: 5000 years of the placebo effect is STILL the placebo effect.

I generally agree with the opening post although I do think most Americans by comparison are way over medicated with drugs that can have very severe side effects.

I have several friends on facebook from Taiwan and they posted an article recently about TCM medicines that they had recently banned because some of the ingredients could actually be poisonous if ingested. This included one of my husband's favorite medicines Xi Gua Shuang. I find this interesting because several people (Chinese) had told me in the past that Western medicine = poison so it should only be taken in the most dire of circumstances. Let me just say, if I had an industry that was threatened by a new, competing product that in many situations could out-perform my own, telling everyone that product is poison would be great for my marketing.

Sometimes I'd catch portions of those doctor shows on TV and I always found it so frustrating that it was just some guy saying people should use such and such medicine or eat some food with absolutely no explanation about why that was beneficial. Even if you didn't watch the show, the info gets passed through co-workers and family.

Again, I think I'd generally prefer some natural, herbal remedy if given the chance but when asked I tend to tell people I "don't believe in TCM".

I believe in TMC, what I don't believe in is the 'doctors', training, schools.

Things from TCM have been proved to work and they became 'medicine' rather than 'traditional medicine'.

I'm not saying that there isn't anything in it, traditional medicine does work for some people, but it's not proper medicine, or they wouldn't need to put 'traditional' in front of it

sometimes it works. Then sometimes it doesn't, and no one can explain why or not. with western medicine, there's always an explanation as to why it should work, although there's often a lot of rationalisation about side-effects after the fact. A case of Chinese trusting practice and westerners trusting theory? Maybe.

Anyone remember the story by Lun Xun about a poor family whose son has consumption? The family bankrupts itself buying quack medicines and foods that are certain to cure the son's illness, but all they accomplish is to become poorer and lose their son. Bear in mind that this story was not written by a foreigner, but a Chinese naitonalist, not a know-it-all western cultural imperialist. You might call it the birth of an urban legend, or you might call it the fictional representation of carefully observed phenomena.

Lu Xun studied medicine for a couple or so years in Japan, so he knew a little bit about what he wrote when he wrote that story.

With the help of Acupuncture, I stopped smoking on 12th January 1982. I had developed Emphysema  about 10yrs earlier and I tried many ways to stop smoking, but none worked. I really don't know if it is mind over matter, but I am very grateful that this appeared to help me.

When I was in China I got a serious ear infection.  The idiot doctor prescribed some medicine.  When I looked online, it was chemotherapy drug that had been removed from use in North America due to serious side effects, like joints exploding. 

I then went to the TCM hospital.  The Dr cleaned the ear, and prescribed antibiotics.  ETR checked with his father and the drug the TCM hospital prescribed was correct.

I ONLY went to the TCM doctors after that and never had a problem.   

Antibiotics aren't TCM.

I agree with kitano. If the medicine was valid, it would just be called "medicine", and not need the "traditional chinese" qualifier.

Question: does medicine apply in a universal sense - do all homo sapiens sapiens have similar enough physiology to benefit from a structured medical response? Having studied anatomy and phys. in University I never once encountered "Caucasians duodenum is located XYZ whereas Mongoloid ABC". [Granted, there are corner cases where some groups have more or less muscles in the forearm, and individual people can vary in the amount of bones in the body.]

Being non-Chinese, TCM seems more significantly a cultural signal instead of an independent discipline. It is Chinese in that is it "not-western" "natural" etc. Apply this same logic to other disciplines - Chinese physics? Chinese biology? Chinese chemistry?

What is more interesting is when it works, and we don't know how. We can bandy about placebo effect, and no doubt a significant margin is due to that, but I could share anecdotes from my life where people I know personally have benefited from non-Western techniques. It is entirely possible that a greater synthesis of understanding could occur if we stop using these polarizing terms.

TCM is a folk medicine. And I think it's fair enough to call it that provided we remember that "medicine" is an applied science and the "folk" in "folk medicine" means "without scientific method". In other words, TCM (as we know it now) is an applied science that lacks scientific method. It gets by on anecdote and tradition.

It doesn't exist in terms comparable to "western" medicine. The "western" tradition it's most comparable to is that of astrology.