Because this stuff has been in the news and because the hocus pocus associated with the reinvention of TCM as TCM™ has always bothered me, I decided to look it up. I like the Wikipedia definition of "medicine":
Medicine is the science and practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.
We might possibly say then that TCM™ is actual "medicine". But Wikipedia, the source of all things, goes on to note:
Contemporary medicine applies biomedical sciences, biomedical research, genetics and medical technology to diagnose, treat, and prevent injury and disease, typically through pharmaceuticals or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints and traction, prostheses, biologics, and ionizing radiation, amongst others.
Trying to think about this, I looked up "alternative medicine" and was able finally to breathe a sigh of relief:
Alternative medicine is any practice that is put forward as having the healing effects of medicine, but does not originate from evidence gathered using the scientific method
Since TCM™ relies on qi and meridians and a bunch of other explanatory but physically insubstantial entities, TCM™ and Western Medicine™ are incomparable objects. According to believers, they compete in terms of healing prowess. But this is simply untrue. Measuring whether or not someone is dead at the end of a given "treatment" is not the measurement of an treatment's efficacy. You measure efficacy by determining whether or not the thing the treatment meant to change did change. But TCM™ and Western Medicine™ do not change the same entities. TCM™shifts qi about the place while Western medicine™ shifts physical processes.
Ghostly things like your qi level and how much "heat" you've ingested are as genuinely measureable as your immortal soul.