Western Hong Kong. A lot of chinese medicine shops. Dried sea animals and fungi. What is the lowdown on chinese medicine. Hokum or hard science?
It depends. Some of it’s legit, some of it’s hokum. After the Communists took control, they handed out books, which in the West have been sold under the name A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, that listed herbal/traditional medicine along side modern medicine to people in the villiages, who by default became “doctors.” It doesn’t contain recipes for using tiger testicles (or things like that) to treat anything (though it does contain accupuncture instructions), so if I were going to use traditional Chinese medicine for anything (and unless modern medications aren’t available, I’d not bother with the Chinese medicine for 99% of things), I’d check to see if it matched up with what was in A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual before trying it.
Thanks. I’m not ill or anything, just curious. BTW there is an ok thread on the topic from a few years ago. It is a bit concerned with the capitalist depravities of Western medicine, which is all very good and stuff. But I’m more interested in the empirical benefits / new pharmaceuticals deriving from traditional chinese medicine.
In a simpler form. (When I’m Hong Kong way) What are the neighbours in Western (a region) getting for the awful load of money they must be spending to keep about one thousand tcm shops in business?
Good reading here. In short, some of it’s hokum, some of it is possibly good stuff, and some of it is proven to be good stuff. As the article mentions, those who practice it “usually have no philosophical objections to scientific studies.” (The article says it needs a cite for that but looking over a few of the external links at the bottom of the article, my impression is that assertion is probably true.)
Nothing, except the possible side effects of ingesting toxic materials, just like herbal remedies from any other country. It’s all just ignorance, pure and simple. You think if any of the stuff worked we wouldn’t be using it here?
The Chinese goverment actively promotes “traditional Chinese medicine” just to stick it to Western pharm companies.
Actually we do use it here. A good number of medications are derived (at least initially) from plants and pharm companies actively have researchers scouring the planet, talking to traditional medicine folk, and bringing back samples for research purposes in hopes of finding more effective cures for diseases.
Cite?
That’s they way most drugs are found, there’s nothing traditional or Chinese about it. Chinese researchers may start with a hypothesis trying to explain why a certain remedy has a certain effect, isolate the reactive components, do double blind tests to establish the effect, and place it into production as a drug “derived from traditional Chinese medicine”, but that isn’t any different than Western medicine. If you go to a “traditional Chinese” medical practitioner and ask him why it works he will give you a long explanation about “Chi”, energy points in the body, and “inner fire”, all of which are nonsense. I’m sure his remedies might have some effect on you but it won’t be because it’s quenching your inner fire.
That’s why I threw in the disclaimer about it being no better or worse than herbal remedies from other primitive cultures. After a few thousand years of trial and error, of course some of it will “work”, but the underlying principles that Traditional Chinese medicine uses to explain why is complete fantasy and of no use to the modern scientist, unless YOU have some reasonable explanation for Chi or any of the other kung-fu movie staples that I’m not aware of.
Everyone in China seems perfectly aware of it, and the ignorant ones are quite proud of it too. Every single drug marketed in China, snake oil or otherwise, is “derived from traditional Chinese medicinal principles”, it’s just good marketing. But if you’re looking for a signed statement from a senior CCP official, I got nothing and I can’t really be bothered to look.
I think the fact that Western scientists do not try to explain why Rogain works based on “life energy” or some invisible, undetectable Ying-yang fire on your scalp is a pretty good indication.
I think the trouble with herbal remedies is that there really isn’t a mechanism to get them properly double blind tested for safety and effectiveness. Or rather, there is a mechanism but no financial incentive to go through it.
It costs many millions of dollars and lots of years to test a drug. 18 months for phase I trials to test safety in healthy volunteers, then 2 years in phase II trials with a couple of hundred patients, then 3 and a half years in phase III trials before final approval is given. And for an herbal remedy where’s the payback? You can’t patent St. Johns Wort, or Ginko Biloba. People can just grow it in their backyard with the tomatoes. Who’s going to come up with the expense of these trials?
And those explainations evolved the same way that the Japanese swordmakers tales about why pounding the fire demons into the iron improved the quality of the metal: People lacking the sophisticated means of analyzing a complex chemical reaction need a way to make sure that others remember exactly how to do something. Western doctors handed out medications for decades that they didn’t know why they worked, but they did. A professional Chinese doctor who dispenses traditional medicine (and there are some) won’t necessarily throw out explainations of “chi” and things like that. Certainly, there’s nothing about herbs affecting “chi” in A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual.
Except you didn’t mention anything about it working, only that one was at risk of “possible side effects of ingesting toxic materials.”
Then a cite should be easy to find.
I am Jack’s total lack of surprise.
Uh, no. Western doctors traditionally spend years and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars learning their profession, while many traditional Chinese herbalists learn the trade from an elder, who in turn learned it from an elder, and so on and so on. The two situations are not really comparable.
Bill Door, you’d have a point, but it’s fairly easy to isolate the effective compounds out of plants, analyze them, tinker with synthetic variants and patent those. Also, according to a NYT science podcast I listened to not too long ago, the pharma companies are quietly buying up all the companies that sell the herbal products. There’s also at least one herbal company claiming that their product is prepared in such a way as to ensure the same amount of the active ingredient is in each dose, which presumably, gives them a marketing advantage.
I’m saying the underlying principles used by traditional Chinese herbalists have no basis in modern science, that’s all. If you feel this is a good starting point to base decisions on health and medical treatment, that’s fine. 
I’m not claiming any superiority of traditional Chinese medicine over modern medicine (you’ll note that I stated “and unless modern medications aren’t available, I’d not bother with the Chinese medicine for 99% of things”), only that it’s not necessarily all snake oil (though certainly things like “vitality potions” prepared with “dragon bones” are). And if I ever come down with lung cancer from all my years of smoking, I’ll be letting the docs pump me full of whatever chemo drugs they think are best. If those don’t work, then I’ll be scarfing down the herbal stuff (after all, what do I have to lose?).
…but my impression is that perhaps you are looking at the explanations for Chinese medicines a little too literally. They strike me as metaphorical in nature, much the same way that we say that we “burn calories” or refer to the body as a kind of machine. I think that maybe the terminology is meant as a way of picturing bodily processes and their relation to each other, rather than referring to actual “fire” or “wood”. IMHO.
Also, Western science has found at least a little bit of evidence that “stimulating certain points along these pathways (Chi meridians) through acupuncture enables electromagnetic signals to be relayed at a greater rate than under normal conditions.”
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~maa1/chi/philos/pathways.htm
My attitude about Chinese medicine is that their culture is thousands of years old, and I feel that the longer one has to gather empirical evedence, the better one’s chances of getting it right.
Most days with proper medication I am not a literal tentacle beast either, but I am Chinese, I have personally, on more than one occasion, visited an accredited “traditional Chinese” medical facility in China. Let me assure you, the explanations given are QUITE literal.
Sure, and it’s explanable via boring old Western medical science. No Chi or meridians or crystals are involved.
Yeah, and 50 (fifty) years ago life expectancy in China was around 41 for men and 43 for women, 80% of Chinese were illiterate and every other year a famine and/or flood would kill millions. I imagine most of them found the thousands of years of culture to be little consolation.
Okay, I can’t argue with that. I bow to your superior wisdom. But I do have several friends who feel they’ve benefitted from Chinese herbal medicine; also when I worked at a local homeless shelter, a few of the residents there were getting (donated) acupuncture for drug cravings, and they said it did help. So with all due respect, I maintain that it may sound like nonsense to some, but it may not actually be nonsense.
I think tentacles are cute, BTW.
Precisely which medicines now in use are derived from traditional remedies? What percentage? Certainly there are some; willow bark was a traditional painkiller before it was isolated into aspirin - but I’m not familiar with many others. I mean specifically drugs derived from traditional medicinal practice, not just drugs derived from exotic plants. What percentage of our drugs come from such sources, as opposed to from pharmaceutical chemists laboring over NMR spectra and flasks of boiling hexane?
I can’t give you precise numbers, nor even make a WAG at it. I know that the German government does have a commission like our FDA that’s purpose is to study herbal medicines and the like, and IIRC, for certain conditions, they recommend herbal medicines over pharmacologicals.
I can, however, point you to the database of such things put together by the FDA. Also, the syllabus of the FDA researcher who compiled much of the data for the course he teaches, and the Library of Congress page (with a link to video) of a presentation he gave at the LoC on the subject.
I can’t actually see, though, where any of that supports the specific claims you’ve made.
Except I didn’t make any specific claims as to numbers and percentages. I can’t find my copy of Dr. Duke’s book where he discusses his work in the field for the FDA and USDA talking with local healers/medicine men about the plants they use (and, IIRC, gives some info about drugs that have been detailed on traditional medicine). I have a slightly more than passing interest in the subject and will read articles on the matter, but don’t keep detailed notes. A fascinating account of one researcher’s efforts to study traditional medicine at the request of pharmacuetical companies is *The Serpent and the Rainbow* by Wade Davis, which has almost nothing in common with the film that’s “based” on the book.
No, but “a good number” certainly implies some significant - if not specific - proportion. Such numbers must exist, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not particularly talked about. I guess I have my doubts as to whether this compelling image of scientists wandering out to the jungle with shamans to learn about their medical practices really is something that happens to any significant scale and leads to the creation of any significant number of our medicines. I have a feeling that the drugs derived from exotic plants used by aboriginal shamans are tiny exceptions that just happen to get talked about because they make good stories.
Can’t we agree that modern pharmaceutical companies have built upon ancient Easterm and Western medicine/medicines… Surely there were derivatives and derivated knowledge of worth. Yes, we’ve come a long way, baby, but to toss away the case history, the human, experience, the psychology of medicine, ancient medicine, the basis, Thousands of years is like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Sterilizing human history with logic is almost laughable.