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Big Data was used to see if TCM was scientific (2023)
- khelavastr 1y agoTraditions form Chinese medicine have been vindicated. This is a situation where more analysis really is more.
- tkcranny 1y agoYou know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine. —Tim Minchin
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoDara O'Brien.
- atombender 1y agoAre you trying saying the quote is misattributed? Because it's from Tim Minchin's comedy act/poem "Storm" [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd
- rcxdude 1y agoI'm not sure if it was completely original there. It's a relatively common retort now, though I do think that Storm was the first time I recall hearing it.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agointeresting, Dara o Brien makes the same joke. Can't be bothered to check which came first. 2min58 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiBhbHRlcm5hdGl2ZSBtZWRpY2luZQ%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiB... I think comedy trends have fashions. At the time comedians made jokes about religion, now they make jokes about trans people, or about being "canceled". When you narrow the range of jokes you might increase the joke collision rate.
- zaptheimpaler 1y agoHowever, the case of meditation/mindfulness shows that it can take a very long time between a treatment being invented and it being proven to work. It was called pseudoscience until it was statistically proven to work. Unproven is not disproven. But it takes discernment to know which unproven thing might work and won't hurt though. TCM sounds more dangerous than not because the herbs you can get will be unregulated and possibly contaminated.
- arp242 1y agoSomething can simultaneously be a pseudo-science and still work. Do some aspects of TCM have benefits? Sure, probably – it's a huge field. But that's more coincidental than anything else, and their mechanisms of action are unrelated to TCM's pseudo-scientific theories. If you go to a forest and start eating random stuff then some will also have some benefit. I'm not familiar with the history of meditation or mindfulness, but I've seen people claim some pretty ridiculous things about yoga, perhaps the most ludicrous was someone claiming that some positions will prevent certain cancers due to "massaging your organs". Yoga absolutely has benefits but that's just nonsense.
- rtpg 1y agoI'm not particularly bought into the traditional chinese medicine stuff but isn't the line more drawn at how "normal" medicine is about synthesizing specific doses of chemicals to give those? Meanwhile if someone told me "yeah eating a bunch of ginger when you have a cold is good to you because ginger has a bunch of stuff that's good for your body then" I don't have a particularly hard time believing it. Sure! Why not! The article's critique about symptom management rather than disease management is legit though. And the precision for actual research is good. But at the end of the day if my body needs some stuff for symptom management and some TCM strategy involves me giving myself like 20x the dose of it... well it's something, isn't it? Though you could argue about it "deserving" credit or not. Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoNo... Normal medicine is whatever we know works. It is unfathomably hard to figure out whether something works, ergo it is very specific knowledge (specific isolated compounds in specific amounts). > well it's something, isn't it? It's probably not! If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.
- rtpg 1y agoFair enough, I can agree with the idea that you draw the line at "knowledge, gotten in the 'correct' way" as the categorization strategy. In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoNo no, my point is that it's unbelievably hard to know things. The reason we do unfathomably expensive clinical trials is because that's what's required to isolate signal from noise in a biological system. The reason they fail so frequently is because we're wrong most of the time we try it. It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false. It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoTCM has a lot of wins along just those lines. For instance: Artemisinin (qinghaosu) from artemisia annua. This won the 2015 Nobel Prize, and is now the cornerstone of global malaria therapy. Arsenic trioxide, the purified form of the TCM mineral pishuang, now a very common treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia. Often curative in a single dose: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213048917300080 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221304891... Camptothecin from camptotheca acuminata, precursor of topotecan and irinotecan for solid tumours. Ephedrine from ephedra sinica -- template for modern bronchodilators and decongestants. Many others. Omacetaxine, minnelide, and more. Very often, the first thing a medicinal chemist seeking new drug templates does is look to herbs that are used by indigenous populations or in "traditional" medicine systems. There's an entire journal dedicated to this: > https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharmacology https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharma...
- roncesvalles 1y agoIt's still not a vindication of TCM specifically. All traditional medicine cultures have contributed something to modern medicine. E.g. willow bark was used to treat pain for thousands of years, which led to the discovery of aspirin. I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago> I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Yeah, lovastatin comes from red yeast rice, which is also TCM. The other statins are downstream of it. > Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up. I agree 100%. But natural products are -- and always have been -- the great repository of drug templates. All modern pharmacopoeias owe a real debt to TCM in particular. Instead of complaining like the guy who wrote the article in OP, it's best to try and take what's good and discard what's bad, without preconceptions or prejudice.
- SuperNinKenDo 1y agoOn the other hand, this does lead to a situation where people simultaneously scoff at a school of thought while telling you that all the useful stuff from said school has already been integrated into whatever orthodoxy they represent. Must be nice to be able to claim credit for something while deriding the people who actually discovered it. Not that I'm a huge "stan" for TCM or anything. I'm very much not.
- JSteph22 1y agoThe placebo effect is a helluva drug.
- mannyv 1y agoMost illnesses take care of themselves in about a week or so.
- _alternator_ 1y agoMy favorite paragraph lands near the end, after a great debunking of the paper: > The authors behind the paper drawing connections between symptoms, proteins, and Chinese herbs are hopeful that their model will show which herbs used in TCM seem particularly promising. They claim that chemicals in some herbs are known to interact with the same proteins involved in a particular symptom, but that this herb-symptom association has so far been ignored by TCM practitioners. They give several examples, such as Aristolochia fangchi known colloquially as Fang Ji which, based on their computer work, could help with abdomen distention. Patients beware: that plant was used in the 1990s instead of the listed herb as part of a slimming regimen in Belgium, where it caused “an outbreak of terminal renal failure.” That is something that abstract maps of chemical interactions may not tell you, but we should not forget what we already know from experience.
- snitch182 1y agoGenes cause fever ? I stopped there.
- knappa 1y agoThat's not what was being said. They are saying that when your body does something different, in this case producing fever, it is (often) because of a change in the level of some number of proteins. You get new copies of proteins through gene transcription, and these changes (both increase and decrease) can be detected through changes in the levels of the transfer RNA corresponding to those proteins. Look up differential transcription analysis for more information.
- mgh2 1y agoRoot of curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466838
- georgeburdell 1y agoGiven the prodigious amount of pro-TCM papers coming out of China, I am concerned about a 51%-type attack on our peer review process that will take decades if not centuries to undo.
- alephnerd 1y agoThere isn't much strategy behind pro-TCM papers other than "publish and perish" due to the hyper-competitive and metrics driven nature of Chinese academia. Most of these papers will be published in lower tier journals and used as a line-item within their CV in order to meet departmental KPIs or get promotions or funding, and some nameless bureaucrat won't care because metrics have been hit and his ass has been covered. My SO had to publish similar kinds of papers when she was in Vietnam - she also had to spend $4-6k in "gifts" for the members of her thesis defense committee (despite her earning a stipend of around $100/mo) and publish politically oriented papers otherwise some technicality would come up to prevent her from getting permission for further research in Japan on an ASEAN grant, and this was at Vietnam's equivalent of JHU. There is a similar trend in India with Aryuveda/Unani. The strategic and commercialized research that matters always aligns tends to align with modern medicine. That said, folk medicine does have credence in a lot of Asia (even in China today) due to issues around access and trust. There is a need for mid-level practitioners, and working on mainstreaming and retraining folk medicine practitioners as MLPs could help from a primary care perspective, and is a strategy both China and India are starting to leverage.
- awesome_dude 1y agoI read this response and immediately thought - it's not an exclusive problem of the Chinese academia, Western academia is struggling HARD with the problem. It's such a big problem in Western academia that the political class in several countries are able to deny "experts", and their understandings. People in general have seen so many missteps within Western academia, both allowing some really poor science to be published, and wrongly denying (and ridiculing) what turned out to be solid (thankfully some of these things are discovered when actual scientific method is employed and hypothesis are tested), that they are willing to accept politicians who deny science.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwaway48476 1y agoThe Chinese government supports TCM because it's cheaper than healtchare.
- avidiax 1y agoI suspect this (and political popularity) is why Swiss health insurance covers non-traditional medicine. Must be cheaper for some people to get acupuncture or herbal medicines, even at a markup, as a first-line treatment. And the placebo effect is real, so it's not like it's ineffective for some cases, just not necessarily better than placebo.
- xwolfi 1y agoExactly, like for instance I've been sick for 4 weeks until last week, like terribly, fever, throat pain, red eye lids, tiredness. Completely dead, just sleeping whole weekends. At some point I broke up with my gf (bit related, bit unrelated to the fact I was dead lol) and... the next day I'm running around, completely fine, dating and flirting like nothing was wrong. We then realized that our relationship was too stressful (many factors there), not working, it was making me completely miserable to a point my body was just noping out of life. Imagine then: should I have taking antibiotics, Panadol, long consultations with specialist ? Or a bit of BS fake juice ? The problem was not solvable by medicine and the government would have had to pay for it - in fact it did since I took all those medications that did nothing much. So not even for the placebo effect, sometimes you're sick because of life (stress is really a sickness inducer) and no amount of pharmaceuticals will truly help you.
- teddyh 1y agoChina is in a bind; for propaganda reasons, they can’t back down from their support of “traditional Chinese *”, just like the USSR with Lysenkoism.
- kurthr 1y ago[flagged]
- dkarl 1y agoMy prediction: within 50-100 years, traditional Chinese medicine will be like osteopathy in the United States: impossible to distinguish from mainstream modern medicine, even though it bears a name reflecting its origins in pseudoscience. It'll be easy enough for them to manage from a perception standpoint. They'll just declare that modern medicine has recognized and assimilated the concepts of traditional Chinese medicine, that "modern" medicine as taught and practiced in the west now reflects traditional Chinese concepts, and that western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine have evolved convergently to the same point because western medicine copied Chinese medicine. It'll be accepted by people who know better as a polite lie. The original appeal of traditional Chinese medicine to the Chinese government was that it made it possible for them to provide a form of officially recognized health care to the entire population long before they were able to train enough doctors. From the government's point of view, there's no reason for it to outlive that necessity. If they want a flood of chauvinistic pro-TCM propaganda to proclaim Chinese superiority -- maybe they do, maybe they don't -- they can do that while at the same time having schools of TCM teach basically the same thing as western medical schools.
- freen 1y agoI will never, ever, ever see an “osteopath”. Or a chiropractor. It’s a red flag for critical thinking capabilities.
- teddyh 1y agoI believe that dkarl’s point was that what is now called “osteopathy” in the US is functionally the same as modern medicine, since that is what actually works. But they keep the name for its brand recognition. (But even if this is true, there is still every reason to avoid it, since if its practitioners were any good, one would assume they would rather be regular medical practitioners.)
- Yeul 1y agoScience can't make you immortal so people will keep turning to mumbo jumbo.
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoA lot of traditional Chinese medicine is actually based on science. That is: a practitioner had many patients with the same ailment, and would give some of them one medication, and others another medication (herbs usually, o mixes of herbs). They'd then keep notes of what worked and what didn't. Rinse and repeat for a few centuries. They didn't always understand why this worked, and often attributed it to a lot of ideas that do sound like pseudo-science. But their experimentation was quite methodic. This isn't ubiquitous. We're talking about thousands of practitioners, in dozens of cultures over millennia. I'm sure some simply sold Chinese snake oil.
- Loughla 1y agoWhere do rhino horns and tiger parts factor into that science? From what I've seen of traditional Chinese medicine, it's about 98% nonsense and 2% home remedy like chicken soup for a cold.
- dyauspitr 1y agoNo, just like with Ayurveda there is plenty of actual stuff they stumbled on through trial and error. In Ayurveda- Turmeric has medically validated anti inflammatory effects, exactly what it has been traditionally used for. Triphala for GI health, Boswell is for joint paint and arthritis, Neem as an antimicrobial, Arjuna for hypertension, Ashwagandha for anxiety etc. There are a lot of these trial and error medications that do work. The ratio is definitely not 98:2, more along the lines of 70:30.
- swayvil 1y agoScience is a rather vague term. What you mean is the scientific culture popular in usa, europe etc. Which has definite biases in its vindication process.
- nsoonhui 1y agoThe science as we know it is pretty well defined. Involving generating precise hypothesis, doing double blind experiments, evaluating results and making predictions, submitting to peer review for result reproduction. But TCM would have none of these, so no, it's not "due to bias".
- swayvil 1y agoThere are always cultural biases. There are always choices of interpretation. Our science does not spring forth fully formed from the observation of phenomena after all
- IAmBroom 1y agoYou really don't understand the very definition of science. It's a means of predicting the success of a hypothesis. It is not a collection of beliefs. There are plenty of successful hypotheses that science has "proven", which are now accepted by the "scientific community", but the word has an actual definition.
- teleforce 1y agoThe Chinese and Korean golden herbs ginseng is way overrated. Just consume ginger instead of the 100x more expensive ginseng for all the recipes that people been come up over the centuries and the nutritional benefits probably the same if not better. It is essentially an overpriced souvenirs for your in-laws, that's it.
- SuperNinKenDo 1y agoI've taken pretty low grade ginseng and gotten a pretty noticeable stimulant effect from it. That's certainly never happened with ginger.
- teleforce 1y agoCare to provide details of the stimulant effect that you were experiencing? I'm mainly referring on the nutritional and health benefits that the in-laws perceived if they were bought as souvenir a few thousands dollars worth of 1 kg ginseng as opposed to the equivalent of 1 kg ginger worth a few dollars [1],[2]. [1] Ginseng: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginseng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginseng [2] Ginger: https://en.mmwikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger https://en.mmwikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoI recommend Examine.com for supplement literature reviews which are far more in-depth than Wikipedia. "Research indicates that American ginseng may improve short-term working memory and reaction time, particularly at lower doses, and some positive results were noted in older adults and people with schizophrenia. However, the overall effectiveness on cognition remains uncertain because no significant improvements were found in verbal memory or attention." https://examine.com/supplements/american-ginseng-panax-quinquefolius/ https://examine.com/supplements/american-ginseng-panax-quinq...
- temptemptemp111 1y ago[dead]
- StopTheWorld 1y agoIn 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou. During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help. One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.
- nsoonhui 1y agoA lot of scientists dabbled into pseudoscience but that doesn't invalidate their scientific accomplishment, and their scientific achievement doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit
- dkarl 1y ago> doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit If you take an idea with a pseudoscientific origin, and you test it in a sound scientific way, you're doing science, not pseudoscience.
- mgh2 1y agoI am sure there are some truths in some thousand years of research, ala "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", but that doesn't validate the system or study as a whole.
- Aurornis 1y ago> Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. TCM is interesting: There are countless different TCM preparations that do nearly nothing are can be actively harmful to the kidneys or liver, but every once in a while there is a a novel compound discovered in some plant somewhere that does something. I can’t tell how much of this is because TCM has some treatments that actually work, or if it’s a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. I suspect it’s more of the latter.
- cdf 1y agoI am biased as an ethnic Chinese, but I feel modern medicine is afraid that it's approach, the sum of parts empiricism may be incomplete, in that we dont understand all the parts yet. The human body is not just human DNA organs working together, but also an ecosystem with myriad bacteria, and we are still in infancy when it comes to understanding the bacteria. TCM seeks a black box metaphorical approach, which sounds like quackery but I do think it is capable of addressing _some_ blindspots in modern medicine, eg why some medication would work on a yin body but not a yang body... the difference is in the bacterial ecosystem. That said, I see TCM (and other traditional approaches) as a last resort when modern medicine fails, and I certainly agree the approach is incapable of resisting shamanic beliefs.
- genman 1y agoWhy not apply scientific method to Traditional Chinese Medicine and use double blinded placebo controlled trials to test its validity? In the end also modern medicine is using exactly this method and can treat substances using the black box method.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoThey are doing that — in China, in Chinese papers. Not everything has been researched yet, but there's quite a lot of active research going on.
- cdf 1y agoThe fundamental problem is TCM acknowledges individual differences that cannot be measured or even dont exist in the eyes of modern medicine, eg identical twins with different diets will have different responses to the same treatment, so going double blind will mean the results will be inconsistent.
- BigGreenJorts 1y agoThis is why sample size is important tho. With a large enough sample size, you can ignore differences in individuals bc the trend of the control will be smaller than the experiment (or not)
- MangoToupe 1y agoWhat an absurd general claim anyway. Triumphantly declaring anything about the wide beliefs of many peoples over thousands of years feels a lot like tilting at windmills. Whoever wrote this paper should not be allowed near the press.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoI feel many commentators here are overly dismissive of TCM to the point of intellectual laziness and even geopolitically-motivated paranoia. Yes, there are plenty of things in TCM to be skeptical about, but skepticism shouldn't be about dismissal but about improving tangible outcomes. Regular/western medicine (however you want to call it in contrast to TCM) can treat many big things but I'm sure many of you have had experience with small, vague, chronic things (like "stomach discomfort problems") that doctors have had absolutely no idea how to deal with, and they just send you away with a "take paracetamol for a few weeks and come back when you're nearly dying lol" attitude. In the mean time TCM can treat many of those cases even if you don't believe in their theories. The current medical paradigm has blind spots, and we should be humble enough to acknowledge that alternative perspectives, even if they're not as rigorous as we'd like, can give us chances to improve patient outcomes. Wholesale dismissal to the point of labeling TCM as "govt propaganda" is forsaking improved patient outcomes for the purpose of winning an argument based on intellectual purity.
- freen 1y agoIt is several orders of magnitude cheaper to produce bullshit than it is to produce truth and/or invalidate bullshit. The truth value/prediction value for the knowledge system as a whole produced by the invalidation of bullshit is orders of magnitude less valuable than the creation of truth. Note: the production of bullshit can be VERY economically/socially valuable for the specific producer of bullshit, but emphatically not valuable for the entire knowledge system. Tolerance of bullshit in a field decreases the likelihood of robust invalidation by others due to the above. It is a plague on intellectual pursuits, and why we are well aware of several famous “bullshit artists” in the western medical tradition: they are famous because bullshitting is rare, unacceptable, and career destroying. If that is not true of a knowledge system, you have a culture, not a science. Culture is great by the way! Awesome! Important! Culture is not meant to be predictive! Not science though. Great way to tell if you have a science on your hands or a culture: are extremely large quantities of money dependent upon accuracy of predictions? If so, you’ve likely got a science! If not, well, might be a culture.
- dreamcompiler 1y agoIn China if you get in a car accident or just catch a bad case of the flu, you'll be taken to a hospital that practices...western medicine. There's a reason for that.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoIn China, they are capable of having a balanced understanding of which pradigm is suitable for which problems. For small, vague or chronic things like "stress" or "chronic stomach discomfort", they go to a TCM practitioner whereas western medicine doctors can't diagnose and treat that properly. This is combining the best of both worlds. The prevailing attitude on HN is not to combine strengths, but to dismiss TCM wholesale based on intellectual purity and geopolitical alignment. This is not only willful dismissal of the potentential to improve patient outcomes, but also shuts down curiocity and starting points for new actual scientific discovery.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoExactly. Western medicine is not particularly good at treating chronic conditions.
- BrenBarn 1y agoThis is news? :-) Whenever I see stuff about TCM being "vindicated" it's usually stuff like this, along the lines "we found a scientific basis for symptom X being alleviated by chemical C which is found in plant P and traditional medicine indeed suggests using P to treat X". And this article seems to basically be saying the same. Big whoop. It's no surprise that people over time figured out that certain plants might help with certain symptoms, and that later with better science we isolated the specific chemicals in those plants that drive such effects. Saying this vindicates TCM is like saying chicken soup is vindicated as a cure for what ails you because it turns out that if you're sick it's good to get plenty of fluids and some protein from chicken and vitamins from vegetables. What matters is not just whether something works, but how it works relative to alternatives, and what its cost/benefit ratio is. If you were living 1000 years ago maybe it made sense to chew willow bark or whatever, but now there's not really a reason to do that instead of just taking aspirin. If you want to eat extra garlic or whatever because it gives you a placebo effect, there's no harm in that, but if you're spending hundreds of dollars on bogus garlic supplements then maybe you're wasting your money. There are a lot of folk remedies that are harmless in themselves, but their main harm comes when they induce people to reject real solutions.
- est 1y agoTCM is not a single branch of "alt" theory, but a clusterfuck of inconsistent, contradictionary schools of thoughts which was umbrella-ed by state funded insitutions after 1949. Forget blind test, you can get 13 different perscriptions from 10 TCM doctors. I am not joking. During the pandemic, top-notch TCM scholars call Covid-19 warm-disease, another group categorize it as cold-disease. Some others name it wet-disease, they all came up with totally different "treatments", which basically boils down to dead bodies of insects and herbs. But why do billions of ppl believe in TCM anyway? Because scientific medicine is hard, and does not cover 100% symptoms. AFAIK There isn't a effective cure against viruses like antibiotics. This market is dominated by pain-killers and "alt" medicines. And yes sometimes ppl refuse or forget to take vaccines.
- bvan 1y agoDid someone poke you with one too many accupunture needles?
- bvan 1y agoLumping all aspects of TCM into one thesis to be proved or disproved seems ill-advised. Would you think of treating western medicine, and all the ground it covers as a single monolithic field to prove/disprove?
- maxglute 1y agoWell marketted placebo has it's place, ancient wisdom/mysticism more useful make believe than plethora of of modern health supplments backed by mediocre "research". It's easier placebo narrative to believe in. E: A 100b (possibly multiple) industry doesn't hurt either, which is... shockingly large. I was going to joke people spend more on dumber things to feel good, but that's... a solid chunk of change.
- hereme888 1y agoAll forms of medicine, new or ancient, should undergo validation and integrated into "mainstream" medicine. If wormwood worked but only when using cold water, study that extract, isolate the compound to promote reproducibility of benefits and minimize side-effects from unnecessary compounds, and attempt mass production at cheap prices for public benefit without destroying the environment. How else can we foster trust that medicines are reliable? Modern medicine was born by consolidating and empirically scrutinizing thousands of years of all sorts of medicine.
- meekaaku 1y agoAnyone is free to use the well tested scientific methods to show if a claim is true or not (medicine or otherwise). There is no need to prefix it western-, modern-, traditional-, chinese, ayurvedic- etc. If it works it is just medicine. There is no such things as chinese physics, ayurvedic chemistry, traditional biolgy.
- AllenRMurphy 1y agoWestern medicine has a similar history. Treatments did more harm than good prior to the scientific method being used. The poor who couldn't afford to see a doctor were actually better off than the rich who were subjected to all manner of bizarre "remedies".
- AllenRMurphy2 1y agoWestern medicine has a similar history. Treatments did more harm than good prior to the scientific method being used. The poor who couldn't afford to see a doctor were actually better off than the rich who were subjected to all manner of bizarre "remedies".
- AllenRMurphy2 1y agoWestern medicine was just as bizarre and ineffectual as TCM in the past. The poor who couldn't afford to see a doctor were actually better off than those who had money.