Traditional Chinese Medicine

Do you remember my FengShui Post? As soon as I get a better understanding on pseudo science, I’d like to spot them on a daily basis. I suffered from Asthma in 2013 winter because of the extreme cold weather and I was recommend to see a Traditional Chinese doctor under my parents’ wish. However, my condition did not get better but worse after I use the traditional medicine. That was when I remember a research I have read an article on the EEO’s website about Chinese medicine when I was finding information about Pseudo Science: “Chinese medicine is not science” [[1]]. In order to convince my parents that Chinese medicine will not be good for me, I did a little research on the process on the modern medicine that is on another category. When scientists research a new modern medicine, it takes about 5 to 10 years before the reliability of the medicine is released. Before scientists have an idea on what kind of medicine they are going to develop, they need to use their memory of knowledge on what ingredients of the drugs would help to cure a specific disease and how to combine them in to a tablet and use imagination to predict the possible side-effects. Plus, scientists will need to use the scientific method to prove their hypothesis. After tons of research and development, the compound become one of the pills we use in our daily life.

Picture from:”https://healthnutritionandexercise.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/can-traditional-chinese-medicine-be-used-for-cancer-treatment/”

As a comparison, there is a huge difference in the developing process of traditional medicine and Western medicine. For a traditional doctor, they have a record of the herbs that they are going to use as a prescription in the form of Ying and Yang: Ying represents cold medicine and Yang represents the hot medicine. And when you come to a traditional doctor, they give you a diagnosis of your body in relation to Ying and Yang. It seems reasonable that both types of medicine are using reason as a main way of knowing but what’s the difference lies in the process. Evidence is the main point of difference so I convince my parent to use the modern medicine instead of Chinese. The result was I recovered after 3 months.

The result show me that Chinese medicine is not that effective than the pill was and it could be a strong evidence that Chinese medicine is a pseudo science; However, the long lasting facts that Chinese people using Chinese medicine to cure themselves have give a good example on the effective side on Chinese medicine, so the real question for us today is to discuss whether the time has weaken the effect of Chinese medicine. For more information about Chinese medicine, click here.

[[1]] Eeo, Web

2 thoughts on “Traditional Chinese Medicine

  1. Yuxing Cai Post author

    However, people can not proof the mechanism of TCM because after many research by scientist, they have found out that the herb use in Chinese medicine were only ‘grass’-not fit into its medical use, So it still need to take a long time to discuss about whether TCM should be consider as a science. In addition, Chinese people do not also use herb stuff in TCM but also in their daily life such as putting some herb into the soup in order to prevent some illness and it start to become a tradition or culture, so it is also an important topic that we are going to talk about( what should we do if our long lasting belief was proof wrong?)

  2. Jinghao Zhang

    Great topic! As I mentioned in my blog. Here in america, there are not may authentic TCM practitioner. Traditional Chinese Medicine is not about telling you how much Yin and Yang or how much hot or cold in your body. it is an experienced- based medical treatment, and it’s also corresponding to many recent medical study!

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