Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some arbitrary po

Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some arbitrary potion to be medicine for some arbitrary disease and the placebo effect, appeal to authority and the desperation of sick people did the rest of the work popularizing them. The ancient Chinese used the positions of the stars to help choose their medicines. This ineffectiveness is shown by the fact that the traditional recipe Tu found actually involved destroying the active ingredient by boiling it! Clearly the original authors didn't know if it worked or not, since it didn't but they still recommended it to patients anyway. Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.