Talk:Traditional Chinese medicine/Archive 2

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Old stuff, moved here 4/9/04

Just to point out why I'm spending so much time on this. This article just hit one of my pet peeves.

I get annoyed when people see traditional Chinese anything and think hippie-dippie aura mumbo-jumbo wise old man in Chinatown talking about kung fu weird forces of the universe. There is this notion that Chinese=mystical and weird while Western=scientific and rational, especially since scientific and rational tends to beat mystical and weird (i.e. kung fu versus AK47. AK47 will win).
The fact is that China has a very strong indigenous tradition of rational scientific analysis. Chinese medicine is an example of this. If you actually look at what most TCM practioners in China do and think, its not any less rational or scientific than what Western doctors do.
The problem is that most Westerners are unaware of this scientific and rational tradition. People are portraying TCM as something that mystical old women do rather than something that people go to conferences and write peer reviewed papers about.
And I'm sure that there will be people who are going to say that all this scientific rational stuff came from the West and that before the West came, all Chinese were doing were the qigong kung-fu exercises. If you actually read the treatises on Chinese medicine, you'll see that most of them were trial and error. As far as this notion that Western medicine is superior because it understands the science behind these things, you should note tht it's only in the last 20 years that people have had any sort of understanding of why some drugs work.
The basic problem is that most Westerners are not familar with how things work in China, and what's more they don't know that they don't know.

(Maybe this is because I saw the Last Samurai and I can't imagine for the life of me why the Tom Cruise character is the hero of the movie rather than the stupid villain.)

User:Roadrunner

Changed wording a bit on interaction between Chinese and Western medicine. First major contact between China and the West happened in 1600, but the germ theory and biological study really didn't start having an impact on medicine until the mid-19th century. We really didn't start understanding how most drugs worked until the 1960's, and you really can't say that drugs were "designed" until the 1980's.

One of the interesting things is that China adopted Western medicine about the same time that the West did. What most Chinese define as Western medicine is surgery and that really didn't become common until the Napoleonic Wars, and only stopped being suicidal in the late 19th century. Anesthetic and disinfection was first used in the West around 1850-1860 and that this point China was on the verge of sending out its first medical students. Also one thing to keep in mind is that surgeons and doctors hated each other and were totally different fields of medicine at the start of the 19th century.

It would be interesting to try to look at historical Chinese treatments and historical Western treatments and try to compare outcomes. My sense is that Western treatments really didn't start to be superior to Chinese ones until really late in the 19th century. For some things its not clear that Western medicine is superior. Sure you want surgery if you have appendicitis, but what if you just have a headache, come down with the flu, or have bad stomach cramps. User:Roadrunner

RK v. RR

Roadrunner, I appreciate the time you are taking to work ont his article, and the information you are contributing. However, I am concerned that you keep glossing over a very important point: Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine are making specific scientific claims that they have never backed up, and which still have no scientific support.

Most practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine are simply asserting that certain medicines and procedures have certain effects on the human body. This is scientifically observable and testable, and is being scientifically observed and tested. The problem here is not philosophical, but logistical. It is hard to run double-blind scientifically valid studies, and there are thousands of compounds that need to be tested on hundreds of conditions. But that effort *is* being made.
Unlike homeopathy, there is nothing in TCM that doesn't make sense biologically and physically. What is clear is that there TCM has a huge pharmacopedia of medicines, most of which are likely to have major effects on the body (i.e. ephedra to give an example).

We need to separate discussions of scientific phenomenon (confirmed existence of gravity, putative existence of Qi) from discussions of how people understand science. Chinese or not, the existence of gravity is demonstratable and undeniable; Chinese or not, the existence of unicorns, of eleves and of Qi, are purely speculative.

"Qi" exists in the sense that it is a concept that lets a person who knows traditional Chinese medicine decide what to do next. Someone has a muscle spasm. You rub it. This makes the qi flow and the spasm disappears. Sometimes the place that you rub is not the place where the muscle spasm exists. This is described in terms of lines of "qi".
Now one can argue about the nature of "qi". Most Western doctors and in fact most TCM practitioners in China today would explain "qi" as a concept that derives from the properties of blood circulation, muscle, and nerves. The "lines of qi" in accupuncture probably correspond to some sort of neural pathways that no one understands. Describing them as "lines of qi" is as good as any other description.

Whether or not people of any ethnicity "eschew" science is not relevant. Gravotu has been proven to be real; Qi has not, and belief in Qi has all the hallmarks of magical thinking

Lines of qi are real in the sense that if you put in needle in point A and then the pain goes away in point B, and "evil qi" is real in the sense that if you stand next to someone with SARS, you are likely to get it. We are not talking about some vaguely perceived effect. Put needle at point A, pain goes away in point B. Put needle at point C, pain doesn't go away at point B.
Another example. According to TCM practioners, ephedra blocks qi to the kidneys. That's actually something very important to know, because it tells you the conditions under which ephedra can kill you. Ephedra doesn't add an qi the the body and tends to burn qi. Which means that if you use it for an extended period of time it removes qi from the vital organs causing possible collapse. The fact that the FDA has banned ephedra because it can block the qi to your kidneys, and because it has killed people who have burned too much qi with ephedra is clearly a sign that we aren't talking about magical thinking.
Now you might argue that there is nothing particularly unscientific or metaphysical going on here, and that there is a perfectly rational and scientific explantion for this. Most TCM practioners in China would agree with you. My problem with your edits is that there was the implication that they wouldn't, and my other point is that talking about ephedra (or any other TCM medicine) in terms of qi, yang, and yin provides some very useful information.
TCM practitioners in China generally don't tend think of "qi" in terms of a metaphysical force the way that TCM practitioners in the United States tend to. You look at TCM papers that try to figure out how and why accupuncture works, and they tend to talk about neurotransmitters. You look at TCM papers on why ephedra blocks qi to the kidneys and they talk about blood vessels and not about aura.


and none of the elements of science. When an encyclopedia discusses any claims about scientific phenomenon, by Asians or non-Asians, we are obligated to analyze such claims from a critical, NPOV perspective.

Something that confusing here is that "qi" is a very common word that means different things in different contexts. Literally the term means "gas" or "air". A balloon is a "qi qiu" a gas-ball.
There are religious or quasi-religious groups which use "qi" to mean some weird metaphysical force, but that's not how TCM practioners in China tend to use the term, and TCM practitioners in China tend to distance themselves from quasi-religious uses of qi. TCM practitioners in California might not.

It seems to me that some of your rewrites on this article are in effect removing much of this analysis.

Because the analysis is incorrect and misleading. If you go to a TCM practitioner in China, he or she is simply not going to sense your aura. Most likely he is going to measure your temperature, look at your general condition, and then perscribe some herbal medicines. Qi tends not to be an important concept in that situation ("yang" and "yin" are more important). Qi becomes important in accupuncture and accupressure, because lines of qi tells you where to put the needles.
Certainly *some* TCM practioners think of qi as a metaphysical force and that needs to be mentioned, but to structure the article in a way that suggests that most do, is simply incorrect. To argue against the validity of TCM by arguing that assuming that most TCM practioners think of qi as a metaphysical force is setting up a strawman.
One other thing. Adam Carr asked the question, who do you see if you have acute appendicitis. Of course in that case, you probably want surgery. But if you just have a fever and you are in China, there are very good reasons why you would want to go to a TCM practitioner rather than a Western doctor. The Western doctor stands a good chance of giving you an antibiotic (which is useless against a virial infection) in an injection (which may involve pricking you with a needle which has not been properly sterilized which exposed you to the risk of Hepatitis B or possibly HIV), and then charging you twice as much for giving you useless medicines and putting your health at risk. The TCM is going to grind up some herbs which may actually end up helping you. One other factor, is that the Western doctor is likely to give you pills which for all you know could be counterfeit or expired, while the TCM practitioners is going to give you herbs in a form that you can see what is going into your medicine.
One other point. Something that is really scary is the degree to which herbal supplements are appearing in the West. In TCM, there is a large body of knowledge on when *not* to take certain medicines, and the fact that this knowledge is not making it to the West is cause for a great deal of alarm. One thing that worries me is the mistaken idea that TCM medicines are somehow gentler, safer, or have fewer side effects than Western medicines and that is simply not the case, so there is a very good public health reason to resist the idea that the core of TCM is the placebo effect or magical thinking.
The contrast with homeopathy is striking. In the case of homeopathy, you can take all of the medicine you want, and it's not going to do anything bad to you. In the case of TCM, you take the wrong medicine, you take the wrong dose, you take things under the wrong conditions, you die.

Roadrunner 07:50, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

RK 21:04, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Addding a new voice

I've made significant changes:

  • added use of TCM as a specific term
  • No anesthetics? They had opium and ethanol, which were widely used in ancient times, even for surgical procedures. And acupuncture is used effectively for anesthesia. This reference deleted.
Actually ethanol and opium are not anesthestics. The problem with ethanol and opium is that the dose needed to render someone unconscious is very close to the dose needed to kill them. User:Roadrunner


  • added more about TCM theory, esp. Yin-Yang.
  • removed reference to "evil qi". The TCM theory of the causes of disharmony doesn't have any such concept.
  • reorganized a bit
  • usage in Chinese medicine texts capitalizes Chinese terms like Yin, Yang, Qi, etc.; also capitalizes names of Organs to distinguish, e.g., TCM Spleen from the anatomical spleen. Also "Taoist" is prefered to "Daoist".

TomSwiss 21:56, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You created excessive line breaks. --Jiang

Repetitive and redundant

Way too repetitive! The antagonism of TCM and Western in the West compared to the situation in Mainland China is explained and asserted numerous times. Kent Wang 02:47, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. I have done some copy editing to improve this aspect. See what you think. heidimo 17:11, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)