Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewbauer | Hacker News Reader

Traditional medicine that is shown to be effective is no longer traditional. It’s modern medicine.

Dunno - stuff like acupuncture works for pain relief but is still part of TCM. If you have a bad back it probably has a lot less side effects than being put on opioids as is common in the US.

I was reading a few years back that they didn't have anything like double-blind studies on chiropractic medicine, in part 'cause double blind studies are much more difficult for procedures than for pills.

I mean, I'm not claiming to be an expert here or anything, it's just that last time I read up on that sort of thing it sounded like there was no evidence that chiropractic medicine or acupuncture was more than just placebo. Do you have citations?

The hard thing about all of this is that, as you pointed out, studies are hard to do. Even if they were funded to the same level as pharmaceuticals, it would be much harder to make conclusive findings. But in the absence of huge companies with profit motives or government bodies with political motives, there's not much funding around for thorough studies.

But some examples of where practices from TCM and CAM are achieving recognition are:

- The Nobel Prize awarded to Tu Youyou for finding artemisinin effective for treating malaria [1]

- A recent NIH review finding acupuncture, yoga and other non-drug therapies effective for common pain conditions [2]

- A study of a chiropractic technique to reduce the physiological effects of emotional stress/trauma [3]

But aside from these studies, surely the market is at least somewhat of an indicator of some level of benefit. Economists generally regard consumers of being capable of making rational decisions about how to spend their money in ways that most benefit them.

Of course it's not a water-tight rule, but nor is it completely false. Yet many people dismiss the entire CAM industry as being fuelled by nothing but stupidity, and dismiss the possibility that at least some of the industry's customers are capable of making rational spending decisions when it comes to their health.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou

[2] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-review-fin...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28181091

Keeping in mind that some antibiotics were found originally in soil. So there's a good chance many random collections of stuff have produced useful medicine. The claim should be stronger than "it's not entirely valueless". How about: on average is it better or worse than modern medicine? Modern medicine is probably better then soil, on average. That's testable. And I'd wager it's better than any alternative effort. Even all of them put together.

All the meridians and whatnot don't lend more credibility over...soil, say. Until they're tested properly. After which Nobel prizes can be won.

> "on average is it better or worse than modern medicine?"

The vast majority of people using/practicing "CAM" are not claiming "CAM" to be "better" than modern medicine; they take a horses-for-courses approach.

Modern medicine is fine for acute illness where you need a medication or surgery to address an infection, break, blockage, etc.

"CAM" seems to be valuable for chronic non-life-threatening conditions like fatigue, pain, mild hormonal issues, mild auto-immunity, etc. It's also chosen by people who are quite healthy and want to keep it that way by optimising their nutrition, emotions, muscular-skeletal strength/alignment, etc.

So it's not a matter of what is better or worse than the other, it's a question of finding the right tool for the job. Every conventional doctor I've consulted in the past few years has endorsed that approach.

To be honest my info was shaky but I just googled and it seems it's kind of like a placebo effect but a good one. There was one study where

>After eight weeks 60 per cent of patients receiving acupuncture, including with toothpicks, reported feeling better. Clinical improvements were reported by just 39 per cent of those who had conventional treatments.

but it didn't make much difference if they stuck in needles or just prodded them with toothpicks. (quote from https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/toothpick-acupuncture-... dicussed by NHS here https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/acupuncture-relieve...)

And even if it's kind of placebo, if the patient feels better that's something, without the risk of an opioid epidemic.

That not what "traditional" means. Traditional dance or traditional costumes don't become modern no matter how "effective" they are.

"Traditional" simply means TCM hasn't changed much over the years.

The point is, the parts of traditional medicine that work are adopted by modern medicine. Meaning, although they're still part of traditional medicine, they're no longer distinctive of traditional medicine. Traditional medicine is distinct from modern medicine only by virtue of the parts that don't work.

This is what is meant by the "traditional medicine that works is called medicine" soundbite. The soundbite on its own condenses the argument very imperfectly, and people should be wary of using it.

Please educate yourself with the term TCM (traditional Chinese medicine, 中药) before making such condescending comments. It's a very specific branch of medicine, not related to the generic English term "traditional medicine".

Your argument, to a Chinese person, is equivalent to "JavaScript is old because Java is old." It makes no sense at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine

Edit: It's also worth noting that in Chinese, TCM is simply 中医, which literally means Chinese medicine. I'm not sure who decided to add the "traditional" in front, but it's not actually how it's called in China.

> Traditional medicine is distinct from modern medicine only by virtue of the parts that don't work.

If you say it this way, then maybe we should stop using the term TCM and just call it its original name "Chinese medicine" so we can both be happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com