TCM: Traditional Chinese Mendacity?

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.

I think Astrology is a bit of a harsh comparison since that has become so marginal because of how rarely it 'works'. The places I've lived in China I've never met anyone who goes in for the Chinese astrology very seriously, whereas the medicine is massive here.
You get those 'health food' shops in the west which sell Western and Chinese traditional medicines, some of it is a con but some of it actually is good for you (and some of it gets you high according to the Anarchist Cookbook!). I just don't think that it's actually medicine

I think Astrology is a bit of a harsh comparison since that has become so marginal because of how rarely it 'works'. The places I've lived in China I've never met anyone who goes in for the Chinese astrology very seriously, whereas the medicine is massive here.
You get those 'health food' shops in the west which sell Western and Chinese traditional medicines, some of it is a con but some of it actually is good for you (and some of it gets you high according to the Anarchist Cookbook!). I just don't think that it's actually medicine

But the parts of it that're good for you are good for you by accident, like when star signs determine temperament. If there really were, say, 5000 years of nearly-scientific trial and error going on, then what's with the obscurely nonsensical entities they make up, like qi?

It's the fireworks thing again. Fireworks means China invented gunpowder. TCM means China invented Medicare, Medicaid, and the NHS.

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.

Does "for every cigarette you smoke, I'll jab another needle in you" really count as TCM?

I practiced acupuncture in FL for well over a decade. I made a living from it. My practice grew from word of mouth.

Does it work for everybody? No.

Does it help treat nerve pain? Yes, if the practitioner knows what they are doing.

It also treats a host of other maladies, but it depends on the skill of your practitioner.

I specialized in nerve pain. That was my niche market.




I've also flipped breeched births by burning moxibustion on the little toe.
I've treated ecstasy addiction, smoking, carpal tunnel, tennis elbow,
bursitis, arthritis, Epstein Barr virus, fibromyalgia, whiplash, disc herniations,
frozen shoulder, knee pain, back pain, migraines, and lots more
that fail to come to mind at this moment in time.

Oh yea, and sciatic nerve pain. That was my specialty. I made a lot of
money just by treating that one alone. I can locate the root cause of pain
blindfolded…that's something I'll never forget.


 

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.

I saw a great piece on this once.  The two biggest points were:

Alternative medical treatments fall into one of two categories.  Has not been proven to work or has been proven not to work.

There's a simple word for those few alternative treatments that have been proven to work.  The word is medicine.

I'd like to know what drives the politics, though.

On the one hand, Western Medicine™ has over the years been a huge source of distress for millions. Drug prices, imperfect medical knowledge, overburdened infrastructure. Capitalist principles seem at odds with medical oaths. Or more exactly, the ability of large systems to avoid perfect competition seems at odds with humanitarianism. And that's where Alternative Medicine comes from? Or is Alternative Medicine a reaction to the institutionalization of health care? By that I mean, do people want to exercise their own control over their own health, and being not scientists, nor willing to die, they make their choices about what to believe.

And on the other hand, there has been some drive to recreate TCM™ as a resource China, and only China, can exploit. It was invented here. All successes reflect glory on here. No splittist invasion of alien conceptualising shall succeed before the glorious might of a 5000 year history of making up cures!

But if it's so easy to make corn of both the Western and the Chinese narratives, why do they persist?

If you read the stuff carefully about Tu Yaoyao's research and awarding of the Nobel, you'll see that although she was originally in TCM and got her anti-malarial ideas from reading ancient TCM texts, once she got the ideas, she used modern medical experimental methods to test and verify.

In one article I read after she won, the spokesman for the Nobel committee got somewhat agitated at Chinese reporters who kept asking if this was validation of TCM and stridently told them No, she had validated and proved the efficacy of her anti-malarial compound through rigorous medical science and testing.

Though her initial work was done at the behest of Mao and involved her and her researchers poring through TCM texts for a cure, once she got a clue, it seems, she used western medical/pharmaceutical methods to test it.

The nationalis who are trumpeting Tu's win as a victory for TCM are wrong. She did it and she did it well adapting western medical research methods to support her findings.

Kind of like an American going, "Woot, woot! My new iPhone rocks! This proves The US is the greatest because Ben Franklin discovered electricity.

It's peculiar though to say that rigor is western. That's what's so odd about trying to work out where the cheerleading for TC comes from. I mean, what are they promoting in place of adequate testing?

It's peculiar though to say that rigor is western. That's what's so odd about trying to work out where the cheerleading for TC comes from. I mean, what are they promoting in place of adequate testing?

Superstition.

I've got nothing against TCM as long as it's understood that it's like Theology; a belief system.

All medicine has its roots in superstition though. I mean you need to have a hypothesis before you can test it. We all have beliefs that are actually rubbish. For instance, how many of you believe that carrots help you see in the dark? (and to be fair, vitamin A does have positive effects that broadly speaking include eyesight). The idea that ulcers are caused by spicy food was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, until it was demonstrated that they weren't. My problem though is that I've heard doctors in Chinese hospitals saying this about spicy foods, and that's just embarrassing for the Chinese health system. If I have a health problem, I want to know whether I'm paying for medicine or superstition.

What?  My ability to see in the dark isn't related to eating 1 kg of carrots every day?

I want to say but whyyy, why China, whyyyyyyyy?!

But it occurs to me, just as America clings to his/her/its pilgrims, guns and Calvinist god, so feng shui rituals and dousings in green tea are going to be "Chinese" forever. We already have the right dynamic: traditional culture, shunned by moderns, incorporated anyway. Just like Catholicism in the New World.

Quote from: kitano on December 30, 2013, 01:51:20 AM

I think Astrology is a bit of a harsh comparison since that has become so marginal because of how rarely it 'works'. The places I've lived in China I've never met anyone who goes in for the Chinese astrology very seriously, whereas the medicine is massive here.
You get those 'health food' shops in the west which sell Western and Chinese traditional medicines, some of it is a con but some of it actually is good for you (and some of it gets you high according to the Anarchist Cookbook!). I just don't think that it's actually medicine

But the parts of it that're good for you are good for you by accident, like when star signs determine temperament. If there really were, say, 5000 years of nearly-scientific trial and error going on, then what's with the obscurely nonsensical entities they make up, like qi?

It's the fireworks thing again. Fireworks means China invented gunpowder. TCM means China invented Medicare, Medicaid, and the NHS.

I studied Kung Fu and Tai Chi for a little bit and Qi isn't complete nonsense, it's more like a philosophical concept than a scientific theory

With all of the traditional stuff it's important to remember that we are in China and a lot of everything is a con. I read a debate about TCM recently (it may have been on here!) and one of the reasons that a lot of people cite for the Chinese still going in for TCM so much is that they don't trust what they get from 'proper' doctors either. It's not that the man on the street thinks that these ancient remedies are superior to modern medicine, it's more that the hospitals that normal people can afford here can and do sell you all kinds of poison in pills and drips so they trust granny's ineffective and none dangerous medicine

I think psychology and psychiatry are a good parallel, although the problem with those is that they very young medically. If you get someone really good who knows what they are doing, they will help you a lot or tell you that they can't help you, the  problem is that most of them don't know what they are doing

Are psychology and psychiatry disinclined to use scientific methods? For all three of psychology and psychiatry and what is traditionally called Chinese medicine, the development of testable hypotheses could be a bit dodgy. I doubt that puts any of them on a par with one another since, as far as I know, TCM is really quite stagnant as theory. I'm pretty sure TCM is an archaic normative science. That is, it asserts and finds ways to support the principles of qi and whatnot, but it does not test them. There isn't a mechanism within TCM against which its own principles can be measured. One might say the same for psychology and psychiatry, except that in those disciplines the scientific method is not actively forced out of contention the way it is in traditional Chinese folkways.