As someone living in China, I feel pretty confident saying that most Chinese are not skeptical or interested in rationality. Even “Science” in China is deficient. We think we have a problem with publication bias in the West; I heard a terrifying statistic that there are ZERO negative studies published in the field of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). And while the country is atheist, huge numbers of people still go the Buddhist temples, bang their heads on the ground and worship statues with blue skin.
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.
Within Asia, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is the system with the longest history. TCM was developed through thousands of years of empirical testing and refinement.
I cringed. Not only do I question what they are calling “empirical testing” but this Time Fallacy (I don’t know what else to call it, perhaps there is a better name) is everywhere in China. “Well, we’ve been doing it the wrong way for over 2000 years so it must be the right way!”
No, actually if you tell me 2+2=5 for 6 billion years, you will still be wrong and 2+2 will still equal 4.
The Economist recently had a much better, much more skeptical piece on TCM:
As someone living in China, I feel pretty confident saying that most Chinese are not skeptical or interested in rationality. Even “Science” in China is deficient. We think we have a problem with publication bias in the West; I heard a terrifying statistic that there are ZERO negative studies published in the field of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). And while the country is atheist, huge numbers of people still go the Buddhist temples, bang their heads on the ground and worship statues with blue skin.
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.
This nature article on TCM shows a similar lack of scepticism.
From the article you linked:
I cringed. Not only do I question what they are calling “empirical testing” but this Time Fallacy (I don’t know what else to call it, perhaps there is a better name) is everywhere in China. “Well, we’ve been doing it the wrong way for over 2000 years so it must be the right way!”
No, actually if you tell me 2+2=5 for 6 billion years, you will still be wrong and 2+2 will still equal 4.
The Economist recently had a much better, much more skeptical piece on TCM:
Medicine & its rivals
Except the belief that 2+2=5 isn’t going to survive for 6 billion years.