3 ms·
I feel TCM's empirical roots probably did stumble on some real remedies (many people I know, including myself, have definitely benefited from certain aspects of
by wenc 1y ago
I feel TCM's empirical roots probably did stumble on some real remedies (many people I know, including myself, have definitely benefited from certain aspects of TCM, especially acupuncture), but there's a problem.
It's a kind of proto-clinical research, and without the methodological discipline of Randomized Control Trials (RCT), it's easy to draw the wrong conclusions from observations. Some observations with small effect sizes might be accepted as truth.
It's not that it doesn't work all the time, but that the conclusions are noisy.
(that said, RCT is not perfect either because the body is a complex variegated thing with feedback loops that we can't fully map, and many interventions have tail risks. But as far as principled approaches for getting at the truth go, RCT offers just one more guardrail against confirmation bias).
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoEh, the replication crisis shows that the "methodological discipline" of RCTs is really not all that strong. But they're still better than nothing. I think you've set up a false dichotomy. If the effect size for a given treatment was small, I would expect it to be outcompeted by other treatments with larger effect sizes. Practitioners who are disciplined in their thinking will make better discoveries, can treat patients more effectively, and will have more business, thereby training more apprentices in their methods. Over hundreds of years, it's easy to see how this process finds treatments with relatively large effect sizes.