My 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.
Given 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.
A 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.
Science 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.
The 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.
In 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.
I 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.
What 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.
I 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.
It 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.
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.
TCM 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.
Lumping 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?
Well 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.
All 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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] thread—Tim Minchin
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a reason for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.