Isn't the point that "western medicine" is a set of things that have been shown to work based on the outcome of controlled tests - double blind tests and so on.

Isn't the point that "western medicine" is a set of things that have been shown to work based on the outcome of controlled tests - double blind tests and so on. As a result of these tests we say that, in general, statistically, "medicine" cures the condition more than doing nothing does (or, more precisely, more than the placebo effect). If we put something through that process and find that outcome, we classify it as medicine. My understanding is that tests of some Traditional Chinese Medicine (which I assume is what we're talking about here when we say "eastern medicine") aren't able to replicate successful outcomes and so we therefore don't classify those things as medicine in the west. That's not to say they don't help trigger the placebo and so on, just that we haven't proven it through double blind studies and so on - which is my understanding of what OP means by "empirical".