Just came back from the Memorial Day break and see many heated debate still on. Add some oil.The whole thing started earlier when many people were fed up with those bad apples who claims they could cure cancers, HIV, and alike with 100% afficacy ---- there are many of those guys around, and interestingly, many people love to ZT those things as well, just look around. Then some guys who have some depth of knowledge just about everything (by the way, it is not that difficult since all you need is some keywords and google) feel they need to jump in to save the world because they hate those bad apples and they could not use their current knowledge to explain TCM. And in deed, some of the TMC stuff can not be explained in our way of logic but some times it works and some other times it does not. So the lable of pseudowhatever is smacked right on the TCM, which if it were for me I do not give a D or I could not care less (so TCM guys don’t feel so insecure, do some good job and convince the world). Remember that Italian guy Galileo Galilei ?Some other guys who also want to abandon the TCM as a national policy including the Rehab physician in NY. Well, there might be some conflict of interest here. As we know it as a common knowledge that the area TCM does the best is treating chronic illness including chronic neck/back/leg/butt/whatever pain. TCM is a huge challenge to the Rehab guys because more people go to TCM means less revenue for Rehabs. It is coming already as many major medical center Rehab/pain management docs/programs already incoorperated the acupuncture part of TCM into their practice. Is this going to become a requirement in the future? Who knows.Denounce the TCM as a national policy? How silly you want to be? People all around the world cherish even the most remote culture relics, well, maybe not Talibans who blew up that huge statue, but do you want to be among them? TCM has its good and bad parts. Why can’t people have little open mind to abandon the bad and keep the good? Plus there might even better things about TCM yet to come once you incoorperate with some more scientific technologies. Yep, many people still believe that their science is more scientific than others science ---- just because of fear, the fear about the fact that they do not fully understand other peoples science but they know their own science inside out. At least they think they do anyway.There are some self-confidence and role-playing issues as well for the TCM and some anti-TCM guys. Know your roles. Know your limitations. Perfect what you do well. And for TCM guys, please accept the fact that TCM is complementary and alternative (maybe this alternative is already too much for TCM). Period. Serious limitations exist for TCM. For example, if you have a leaking aneurysm in your brain you wouldn’t go to TCM, right? D! not a good example because TCM does not even know/diagnose ruptured brain aneurysm. Allow me try it again. Take guy shot wound for example, is you lung is collapsing and blood is coming out everywhere, you get western medicine/surgical care stat! Cooking that TCM soup is kind of too slow – and you have to cool it before drink it after cooking so you waist even more time. On the other hand, for that back pain patient who has no disc protrusion or spinal stenosis who failed western medicine treatment the TCM can shine, sometimes.I guess at least 2 things we can do to help. One is to educate people about the limits of each. This include educate the MDs as well because you just can’t send some patient to TCM. This may also include to establish clear guidelines for TCM, such as all patient have to go through a diagnosis process by western medicine initially. If this western medicine diagnosis and treatment scheme is not working, then “complementary and alternative” TCM would kick in.The other thing we can do is to vastly boost research on TCM using western scientific methods. Think about it. How much money and man power the whole world has put in for the western medicine research? One tenth or one millionth of that spent on TCM research? How about get rid of all those yao-yin-zi in TCM soup to see whether the effects are the same? If it is the same then a huge part of criticizes of TCM is out of the picture, isn’t it? How about researching on the anatomic basis of those acupuncture pathes/jin-mai? How about reducing the number of herbs in the TCM soup one at a time to see if the effect is the same? Yes it takes time but you have better ideas? The best medicine to cure malaria was developed from TCM this way, wasn’t it? It is a wait of time and money to some extent. But, hey, how much of those NIH dollars are wasted? About 80% of the published data are insignificant at all, isn’t it? Is it better to let those corrupted officials to waste those money? The debate will go on. Do I trash TCM now? No. Why? Because I do not fully understand TCM. I have an open mind. I believe we are just a small bleb in the course of time and history. The time machine is not ready to tell us the future yet. We do need to prevent TCM from harming people but there is also a need to further explore the full extent of TCM because it does have its own merit. So TCM guys, distinguish or distance yourselves from those bad apples and work harder. Show the world what a better job you can do!
