Big Data was used to see if TCM was scientific (2023)

> Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations.

Most people don’t care where, when, or why a concept was invented as long as it works.

Quibbling over who discovered it first or trying to drag the conversation back to who discovered it first is like the person who tries to claim credit for being into a band before they were popular: Nobody cares, they just want to enjoy it.

> The older I get the more determined I find myself trying to glean the accrued wisdom of people who came before us...

Going back to the actual article: There is a big illusion of accrued wisdom of the ancients in TCM that isn’t backed up by the research. There are occasional hits where a TCM preparation intersects with a truly active compound, but it should be raising red flags when TCM practitioners claim to have cures for everything and different TCM practitioners will come up with different answers for the same patient. When the first one doesn’t work they’ll have another answer the next visit, and the next visit, and so on.

I 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.

The unspoken part is the human mind is a big part in health, and treatments that does nothing medically but fools the human mind can work wonders too. There is a lot we do not understand yet, just as blood letting was conventional medicine a few hundred years ago, and it isnt even entirely wrong since we still use leeches and some treatment, I think we have much to gain if we are not hasty in dismissing alternative approaches.

That said, I fully agree homeopathy and chiropractherapy are full of bullshit and potentially dangerous. TCM, as practiced in a certified scholarly environment in Asia, expects the practitioner to have a considerable basic knowledge in modern medicine too, and is humble enough to acknowledge TCM cannot solve everything. A good TCM practitioner will refer you to a GP when they know modern medicine is more effective.

And just who here is rejecting the viral model? Saying "other practitions have stuff worth exploring" is not at all the same as "the regular western medicine model should be abandoned". Why do you feel threathened? This makes no sense to me.

Yet the inverse is not true: the prevailing attitude on HN here is not "western medicine is here to stay as staple but other practitions can add value on top", but to dismiss other practitions wholesale based on their inability to conform to intellectual standards, regardless of measurable outcomes. This is "my god is the only god" all over again.

A chiropractor was able to heal my back problems where months of going to a physiotherapist failed to do so. Aren't we supposed to stay humble and curious for new avenues of scientific exploration, rather than dismissing everything we don't understand?

This 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)

It isn't all that different. The religious aspect of Aryuveda/Unani isn't that significant (no one is quoting sutras or the Koran in AYUSH "research" - they're BSing systemic and evidence based methods the same way TCM "researchers" are), and Aryuveda/Unani programs (BAMS/BUMS) aren't much different from their TCM equivalents in their "research" as well as curriculum.

India's AYUSH Ministry (founded 2014) is itself based on China's NATCM and the formalization of TCM in the 60s-70s.

And just like in China, BAMS/BUMS is used as a stopgap MLP in rural and underserved communities the same way TCM is in China.

Both are holdovers from the anti-colonial movement of the 50-70s that continue to be cynically used as stopgaps for failures at expanding MLP in both countries, because no real doctor wants to work in a rural primary clinic earning $200-400/mo when they can demand 6-7x that working as a doctor in an urban area with superior amenities.

The problem exists in Western academia as well, but not to the same magnitude as in much of Asia.

In Western and especially American academia, there are private sector grants and commercialization avenues for research. Outside of top tier programs (think Peking tier programs in China or AIIMS tier programs in India), that's nonexistent in most Asian countries, so your department's funding is at the whim of government bureaucrats who tend to be recruited via civil service exams and promoted based on political loyalty, not based on domain experience.

Furthermore, Folk Medicine programs are heavily sponsored in a number of Asian countries as a misguided attempt at building an MLP pipeline plus as a cash grab by local or provincial governments who often treat these kinds of programs as businesses.

> How much is tuition in Vietnam

Public medical school tuition is around $3-6k per year in a country where most households aren't earning above $300/mo, financial aid is nonexistent, and "student loans" for the middle class means going to some tattooed chain smoker jeweler who pounds Ruou San Dinh like water and demands double digit interest rates.

> you could change some trivial details and end up with a valid description of JHU

You don't have JHU students (or any Western medical students) moonlighting as unlicensed doctors under their professors working license and giving them a $200-500/mo cut. This is fairly common at UMP Hanoi and HCMC, let alone lower tier programs. You also don't need to pay a $1-3k bribe in speed money to get your working license in the US.

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There's a reason my SO immigrated abroad like a lot of her peers - if you don't have the right connections or enough money (black or white), you will not succeed in Vietnam.

Thao Dien, Landmark 81, Sunrise City, and D1 is not representative of middle class Vietnam - neighborhoods like D10 and Phu Nhuan is.

That's an extremely silly objection when (a) artemisinin is effective as a standalone drug if you administer it frequently enough, (b) the discovery of artemisinin and its derivatives in malaria treatment was quite literally inspired by TCM, and (c) most natural products are modified prior to use in pharmaceutical industry, and artemisinin is particularly lightly modified. (Just given a simple ester in artesunate's case.)

> 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.

Fair 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.

I'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.