I kind of have the feeling that's been going on here in the USA since WWII. The 40s gave us a really good reason to be arrogant about our own superiority in the 50s and into the 60s, but since the 70s things have been going downhill and no amount of "USA! USA!" chanting seems to help.

>Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it.

That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of Chinese medicine.

My take on Chinese medicine, and this goes for a lot of non-western 'science', is that it's based on very-long-term observation of cause and effect, with untestable/untested theories to explain 'why' the cause causes the effect. In contrast, western science is much more focused on breaking down causes and effects into very small pieces and doing repeatable experiments to discover 'why' in ways that can be applied more generally.

For example, acupuncture: Chinese doctors learned through observation that if you stick a bunch of needles along this line, and give them a little tweak, it'll help that organ over there to function better. "Why?" "Well, there's this energy you can't see flowing though you, and the needles make it flow better." "Oh, neat." As long as the explanation is internally consistent with the observation, the theory is sufficient. It just can't be used to accurately predict new causes and effects that haven't been observed yet.

The big drawback to the western approach is that by focusing on the details, it looses the holistic overview, and we wind up with drugs that help one particular health issue while causing a bunch of other health issues. Thankfully, as you mentioned, western medicine is moving back towards the holistic viewpoint, but now it's based on fundamental understanding of the individual biologic processes unlike traditional Chinese medicine. Best of both worlds, I think.