Saturday, November 08, 2003
CHINESE TRADITIONAL MEDICINE AND SCIENCE
The Financial Times has an article about attempts by the government in Beijing to develop some standards for "traditional Chinese medicine." The article points out that
... the very attempt to apply a rational and codified framework to treatment could also undermine Chinese medicine's appeal to those who see it as a more natural or even mystical alternative to impersonal western methods. Indeed, some local practitioners feel that Beijing's introduction in recent years of licence requirements and examinations for Chinese healers has been an imposition of western ideas on an ancient eastern tradition. "Chinese medicine is very much about experience, passed from teacher to disciple, father to son or grand-father to grandchild," says Gao Yuchi, a doctor of traditional medicine at a Beijing hospital. "It's not something that you can read in a book or that you can be tested on."
(via Butterflies and Wheels) I think that's exactly right. I'm deeply skeptical about what gets called "traditional Chinese medicine." This body of practices has become closely tied up with ideology and nationalism in China over the last hundred years or so, with each successive dominant political ideology claiming the virtues of a peculiarly Chinese way of approaching medical practice. This has played into the hands of the relativst multiculturalists and purveyors of New Age ju-ju in the West, both groups with a strong antipathy to the scientific method and a tendency to romanticize everything non-Western they encounter. This is not to say that there aren't some effective elements of the practice and pharmecopia of traditional Chinese medicine -- you're going to come across some useful things in 3,000 years of trying one thing and another. But the underlying theories of "yin" and "yang" and "hot" and "cold" elements are no more scientific than the equivalent premodern ideas of humors and essences in the West were, and are no more likely to provide an alternative to the scientific method as a guide to developing effective medical treatments. For a truly skeptical look at the over-all subject matter, here's a lengthy article from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal about its review of traditional Chinese medicine and associated Chinese-style ju-ju. One interesting observation in this piece is the fact that the dispensation of traditional "cures" in China is no less symptom-oriented and no warmer or more "personal" than what was seen in the clinics there applying scientific medical techniques.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:06 AM
