Having grown up in China, it took a LONG time to shake off all the belief in belief that primary school instilled in me (if you read the singing and dancing article recently: I marched together with the entire school every day from the age of 6. Infer about my personality what you will.) Deconstructing the ridiculous amounts of blatantly untrue cached thoughts I have takes a lot of mental willpower, even now. Indoctrination doesn’t have to be about religion.
The problem with TCM is that it’s just not been scientifically researched. There’s bound to be lots of good stuff, especially in the herbal stuff (it’s not homeopathy, there’s at least active ingredients in there), and there’s bound to be lots of bs, especially in the chi stuff, but it needs a significant western pharmaceutical team to dig through everything, find the useful chemicals and isolate the effects, with the expertise but without the biases of Chinese researchers. Unfortunately, that’s a massive undertaking that I don’t see happening any time soon. I mean, the success story of artemisinin in malaria treatment should be encouraging, and I personally assign a 90%+ probability that somewhere in TCM there are useful treatments/cures for things that western medicine don’t cope with very well yet, but isolating them could be a difficult task.
Having grown up in China, it took a LONG time to shake off all the belief in belief that primary school instilled in me (if you read the singing and dancing article recently: I marched together with the entire school every day from the age of 6. Infer about my personality what you will.) Deconstructing the ridiculous amounts of blatantly untrue cached thoughts I have takes a lot of mental willpower, even now. Indoctrination doesn’t have to be about religion.
The problem with TCM is that it’s just not been scientifically researched. There’s bound to be lots of good stuff, especially in the herbal stuff (it’s not homeopathy, there’s at least active ingredients in there), and there’s bound to be lots of bs, especially in the chi stuff, but it needs a significant western pharmaceutical team to dig through everything, find the useful chemicals and isolate the effects, with the expertise but without the biases of Chinese researchers. Unfortunately, that’s a massive undertaking that I don’t see happening any time soon. I mean, the success story of artemisinin in malaria treatment should be encouraging, and I personally assign a 90%+ probability that somewhere in TCM there are useful treatments/cures for things that western medicine don’t cope with very well yet, but isolating them could be a difficult task.