See P5-6 in section "The implausibility problem" - which points out that in order for the treatment to be effective it had to be refined into a form that is not rapidly eliminated from the body.
When you have thousands of years of people writing down their folk cures, sooner or later somebody will be right.
Wasn't the entire idea behind evidence-based medicine to start putting traditional western treatments to the test and check if they actually work? I think we do take traditional western methods quite seriously, and we should do the same with TCM.
With regard to your bark example, right here in the thread someone points out: "E.g. willow bark was used to treat pain for thousands of years, which led to the discovery of aspirin."
But no, at a normal conversational level- most the people around me (American midwest) would wait for the rest of the joke if I said I was going to the apothecary to get something for my headache.
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