Merits of Chinese Medicine

Great Debates
1

This is an invitation to share views on the merits of Chinese medicine. For backgrounder, please read the following cite, my thread in General Questions on a quest for information from Dopers on Chinese medicine.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3638836#post3638836

Excerpts:

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What do you think, is Chinese medicine really efficacious, at least in the range of illness it claims to treat well, even though Western science does not seem able to penetrate into its working basis on the fundamental premises of Western science?

I think we are here face to face with a world that is not so far penetrated by Western science, not penetrated as much as I would want, so that I can understand it the way I understand gravity and infection from bacteria or virus.

Well, what do you think?

Susma Rio Sep

2

Your “Western science mind” should have no problem in accepting what is supported by evidence whether you understand it or not. I may not believe that what works in Chinese medicine works on the bases claimed, but if it works, then it works. If it has no evidencary basis then proceed with great caution. Afterall many Western meds are used without really understanding how they work … or with an understanding that later turns out to be wrong. It didn’t mean that they were ineffective. I am fascinated when some herb is found to exert its effect through some newly understood interleukin receptor system, but my accepting or not accepting its safety and efficacy is independent of understanding the mechanism of action.

Some of traditional Chinese medicine has met the evidenciary burden, much has not. But it can be tested.

Problems with traditional Chinese medicine are implied in the above abstract, however.

Compounds available in the US are notoiously adultereated. What is in it is often very different than how it is labeled.

There are idiots out there putting themselves out as knowing what they are doing. They can do you harm. Substantial harm.

Your cite is quite correct: take advice only from someone seriously trained in this stuff and who is sure of the reliability of their product source. Be aware of potential herb-drug and disease-drug interactions.

3

Chinese medicine is designed to prevent disease in early stages.

Western doctors are more interested in making a buck than curing the patient or preventing disease. They should be at war with the food processing industry.

Pharmaceutical companies make designer chemicals because natural substances can’t be patented.

Western medicine runs on info hiding and intellectual intimidation. Like the computer industry. It is the psychology of the culture.

Dal Timgar

4

**

But does it work?

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Regardless of what they’re more interested in doing it is interesting to note that diseases like polio, smallpox, and the bubonic plague were eliminated (more or less) by the western medical establishment. Also, unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand, you must have noticed that there are doctors speaking up about the dangers related to food consumption in the United States.

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That might be correct. Are there any natural remedies that prove as effective as these natural substances in curing or treating diseases?

What’s being hidden and who is being intimidated? What does any of this have to do with whether or not Chinese medicine works?

Marc

5

I think this pretty much ends the discussion.

**
Exactly so. No one has ever shown that the metaphysical and mythological mumbo-jumbo surrounding Chinese traditional medicine has any objective validity whatsoever. As a scientific/predictive system it’s a load of crap.

That is not to say that some Chinese remedies don’t work, at least to some extent. Most traditional medicine systems have some effective remedies. I believe that American Indians were using willow bark tea for pain and fever. However, that worked because willow bark contains salicylic acid, not because willow carries the strength of the great water spirit’s cooling power or whatever reason they came up with to explain it.

The bottom line here is that there is every reason to test traditional Chinese medicines that appear to be effective. There is no reason to take on board any of the claptrap that goes with it.

6

Dal Timgar:

Cite, please. However, I’ll give you half a point in that many pharmaceutical companies are focussing on maintaining disease rather than curing it.

Again, 1/2 point. I would add that we should be at war with the food processing industry as well as all industries which promote the unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles that Americans enjoy and that other wish to emulate. Hell, we should be at war with people for eating crap and smoking too much.

However, correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t most physicians, including Hippocrates and (I would venture a guess) his Chinese counterparts, traditionally charged a fee for their services?

Once again, 1/2 point. Can’t patent what’s already there. It’s…technical.

However, pharmaceutical companies make “designer chemicals” for reasons that, I am sorry to say, are less than malignant. Here are two:

1. More potent than naturally-occuring compounds. All medicines work by virtue of the interaction of their specific 3-D structure with a specific target (usually an enzyme). Recent advances in understanding biochemical pathways and protein structure has lead to the “rational drug design” of molecules specific to a given disease state. An unfortunate analogy would be the “carpet bombing” of WWII * versus* today’s “smart bombs.”

This results in drugs that pose fewer side effects and are more efficacious than naturally-occuring compounds. Additionally, such “designer chemicals” are often easier and cheaper to make than to extract their naturally-occurring analogues.

2. Standardization. The potency of naturally-extracted phytochemicals varies according to species, season, region, weather patterns and preparative method. Many “natural” apothecaries and indeed, large-scale producers of “naturopathic” medicines lack the facilities and/or know-how to ensure that their remedies have a standard dosage, or even if any of the active ingredient exists at all!!

Once again, a cite would be useful. I don’t know about you, but at work we have something called “the internet”. Every day, I get e-mails and links to the latest-breaking news on genomics, proteomics and medicinal chemistry. I get patents, review articles, and the results of clinical trials. You might want to check this out, although I must warn you that you will need a device called a “computer.”

As someone (it was the French, I think) put it, “You can take medicine for a cold and be cured in two weeks. Or you can do nothing and get better in fourteen days.”
Bizz

7

As already mentioned, the history of Asprin is a case in point. There probably are useful treatments to be found in Chinese medicine, just as there are in the traditions of other cultures.

The first thing to do is to find out if any traditional Chinese prescriptions actually work. It is my understanding that there is a deal on “intuition” in comming up with a prescription for a particular patient so that patients with the same complaint may be offered different prescriptions. This makes testing very difficult.

Even if a working prescription (for a particular complaint) can be demonstrated to be effective, there is the time consuming task of sorting out the the permutation of active ingredients that have the desired effect - and removing those that may be doing harm.

I am not sure that this is true. Obviously one cannot patent a traditional treatment known for centuries, but identifying an active ingredient, extracting it and using it as a drug should be patentable. Patents can be applied to the applications of a discovery.

8

(If you are in a hurry, please proceed right away to the third paragraph.)

I come from a Catholic university and also did my high school years in a Catholic school. Looking back, the priests and sisters who teach there, though being very intellectually keen and expansively learned, appear now to me to talk and discuss and debate on so many things which they never themselves experience, for having taken the vow of celibacy or chastity, by which they have excluded themselves from sex and marriage and family and managing a home.

Let me recall: one day in my high school years I came across a series of books just delivered in the library, all of them each has the title starting with "A Father (Priest) Speaks on . . . Sex, Dating, Petting, Marriage, Family, Contraception, Home Budgeting, Problems with Children, etc. “A Father Speaks on Sex” has some four pages describing in words the male and female genitals and their functions, but without any pictures or drawings at all. I was saying within myself: “Now, that’s really funny, a guy speaking on so many things which he has no experience of and can only look forward to more of no experience, things he’s never seen much less touched.” (Those were the days, or I thought so then.)

My point is that we should all invite ourselves to experience Chinese medicine, then we can talk from experience. Also aside from personal experience, talk to people who have tried Chinese medicine and came out satisfied, and certainly those also who came out not satisfied and even dissatisfied and hostile from their encounter.

“Experience is the best teacher”: that cliche I think should be the most basic method of research in regard to Chinese medicine.

Ok, all you guys who have not yet tried Chinese medicine, if you have any medical complaint that is not life-threatening and in need of emergency attention, ask around for a decent and well-recommended Chinese medicine practitioner, and go for some consultation with him. Read my thread in the General Questions forum on “Chinese Medicine, the Straight Dope, Please”, for some useful tips in deciding on the Chinese medical practitioner to patronize.

Susma Rio Sep

9

BTW western medicine is also well-established in China. E.g., the Tianjin Medical University is a school that uses western medicine.

10

What exactly is being debated here? Both this and your GQ threads sound more like proselytizing than debate or posing factual questions. I vote that this thread be moved to IMHO.

11

I also recommend that you try crystal therapy, laying on of hands, and sacrifices to Ba’al. You should invite yourself to experience them all, then compare them to Western and Chinese medicine. We’ll be waiting…

12

My SO works in the industry, and she tells me something rather disturbing about the Western drug industry Basically, most of it has abandoned the idea of developing drugs for sick people. The problem with sick people is that they either get better, or die, at which point they stop buying the drug. So, instead, the new direction is to market drugs to healthy people with minor or no problems at all: people who’ll just keep on buying forever. This is a pretty neat racket given that many of these drugs create at least a psychological depedancy, if not a physical one (some even have bad withdrawl effects)

Basically, this comes down to her estimate that out of thousands of drugs currently under research, only about 15% are actually even intended to cure or even fight physical or severe mental disease.

Unfortunately, as crazy as that is in terms of societies odd investment choices in medcine, it doesn’t mean anything for the validity of Chinese medicine.

13

** You think that and you would be wrong. As Roger Brinner said, “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.” You are arguing for sloppy-minded subjectivism whereas science is based on an objective world view. Until you grasp some of the basic principles of “western” science, there is no point in having a discussion with you on this topic. If you want to start a thread on the basic principles of science you might actually learn something useful. Heck, you could just read a thread on the basic principles of science as I believe there have already been quite a few.

Without that background, I predict you will simply refuse to hear what people are saying. You’ve already provided proof of that. Remember the quote I began with?

**
Now this was offered by a proponent of Chinese medicine as an explanation of why traditional medicine is “outside” of “western” science and, therefore, not really subject to it. To most people – at least people with a scientific clue – however, this is an open admission that the “principles” of traditional Chinese medicine are completely worthless. Medicine is based on bio-chemistry just as engineering is based on physics. If someone wants to build bridges based on combining materials and shapes “in formulas that have no relation whatsoever” to physics, I don’t advise you to drive on them just for the experience.

This is, once again, not to say that traditional medicine hasn’t hit on a few things that work. But the Egyptians managed to build pyramids, too. Nonetheless, I don’t see any big movement to adopt ancient Egyptian civil engineering techniques. Nor does anyone (outside of, possibly, a few lunatic fringe types) suggest that ancient Egyptian civil engineering was somehow beyond the comprehension of modern science.

Anyway, if you offer traditional medicine’s complete disjunct from science as some sort of evidence for its validity, it’s in the same camp as homeopathy. You’re not going to sway a practioner of homeopathy by explaining basic chemistry and you’re not going to sway a hard-core advocate of traditional chinese medicine by explaining basic principles of science and scientific inquiry.

The bottom line here is that there is no point in discussing the benefits of Chinese medicine if you maintain that Chinese medicine is impervious to “western” science. If you agree that Western science can explain what works in Chinese medicine, then the process simply become one of sorting through Chinese medicine and chucking out the rubbish. But that has nothing to do with “experiencing” Chinese medicine, it has to do with objectively testing and analyzing it.

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Thanks, Susma but if it’s all the same, I’ll just patronize you, instead.

14

Any specific examples?

You’re not implying that the drugs are made to have these effects on purpose, are you? (Besides, these withdrawal effects can be minimized quite easily by reducing the dosage properly)

This is based on the assumption that we can cure these physical or severe mental diseases you speak of. Do you have any specific cites?

15

Truth,

While I love that Brinner quote, I think that you are a bit idealizing Western medicine when you state

Nah. Most of Western Medicine is based on serendipity. Aspirin wasn’t designed bottom up. It was used, found to effective, and then its efficacy explained according to scientific models as they developed. Modern antidepressants were a fortitious finding of a side effect of certain antihistamines, not designed out of an understanding of serotonin re-uptake. Penicillin was a chance observation, as was phototherapy for neonatal jaundice. And improvements have often been random variations around the edges. Our stories of how and why they work are often wrong and change as we learn more. In my medical school theophylline was the model for the cyclicAMP cascade … by residency it was determined that such occurs in the lab, but that physiologically it works by entirely other means (direct effects on the diaphragm and the CNS). What is scientific is that we do not accept our understandings as the final word and we are aware that our understanding is a flawed work in progress. As we learn more we sometimes do design from understanding up but such is not the requisite for being scientific … being willing to be held up to the burden of proof and efficacy is.

16

Doesn’t Chinese medicine work for ‘life-threatening medical complaints’ then?

I just finished watching a BBC program about ‘The Energy Bank’. They use Chinese techniques (including Feng Shui) to cure people who are HIV positive. They guarantee it.
We watched 6 months in the life of an HIV positive guy with a T-cell count around 300.
A Western doctor said he could be treated with retroviral drugs.
The Energy Bank guaranteed their treatment would put his T-cell count at over 800 in 6 months, but that he must have nothing to do with Western drugs.
So he spent 6 months with them, 8-10 hours a day. He kept explaining how good he felt and that he was positive all would be well.
At the end of 6 months his T-cell count was around 300.

And he had paid them £34,000 - non-refundable.

(that works out at an annual $113,000 for no result :rolleyes: )

17

DSeid
I guess I didn’t make my point clear. While much of western medicine is empirical, you agree, do you not, that medicine works because of biochemistry?

Of course, you may not understand the underlying biochemistry but it is fundamentally knowable and consistent. In that respect, medicine and biochemistry is quite similar to engineering and physics. Engineers can do lots of things that they do not yet fully understand the physics for. Just as in medicine, trying to figure out exactly how some effect occurs leads to better theories and additional discoveries.

Just as there is no engineering not ultimately based on physics, there is no medicine not based on biochemistry – at least not medicine that actually works. At any rate, if a practitioner of Chinese medicine wants to convince me that there is some other system of medicine that does not rely on biochemistry for its effect, say, for example, Qui Gong . . . Well, let’s just say, the burden of proof is going to be on them.

18

It does. I point you to the treatment of SARS.

From the WHO website, some latest statistics are as follows:

PRC - 5327 cases, 348 deaths
Canada - 252 cases, 38 deaths
Singapore - 206 cases, 32 deaths

The death rate for these countries are:

PRC - 6.5%
Canada - 12.7%
Singapore - 15.5%

The significance of this is TCM was used for treating SARS in China.

19

** Urban**

Man, I hope you just happened to omit the sarcasto-smiley in your last post.

Assuming that you were serious, I have to admit that I do not recall reading anywhere that SARS was being treated solely by traditional means in mainland China. Could you provide a cite for this?

Also, In light of China’s reluctance to face the problem, their paranoic concern over public image, their shoddy record-keeping and statistics, and their overall track record, I can offer two alternative reasons for the lower mortality rates in mainland China: they are either out-and-out lying or cooking the books.

20

Of how sick people die?

No, just that these drugs are marketed differentially: those that are long term are getting much more attention in terms of marketing and research whether they are medically necessary or not. It’s not that I’m blaming the companies for this. I’m just saying that the people who decide what society invests in: the consumers, do not seem to be making the wisest of investments.

I guess you’re right: if we don’t research or expend money on trying to cure them, we probably are less likely to cure them.