Traditional Chinese Medicine Has Not Been Vindicated by Science

Summary

People love to show that skeptics were wrong about something, especially when national pride hangs in the balance. The South China Morning Post published the following headline on November 3rd: “Scientists find traditional Chinese medicine is based on a complex network of proteins – 3,000 years before modern science.” The article points out that respectable editorials in the scientific literature had repeatedly referred to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as “largely just pseudoscience” and “based on unsubstantiated theories.” Yet here was the believer’s vindication: that TCM really was rigorously scientific while predating the European origin of what we refer to as “modern science.” Skeptics were bound to eat their hats. The study itself, published in Science Advances, is certainly interesting, but its complexity makes it opaque to the average person. It’s one of those impenetrable bits of data wrangling that can easily be dismissed as nonsense by the TCM skeptic or blindly embraced as confirmatory by the TCM believer. Let’s dive in. Exploring links between symptoms, proteins, and herbs The paper only focuses on the herbalism part of TCM, ignoring the many other interventions, like acupuncture, qigong, and cupping, that are often found under the TCM umbrella; hence, to claim that this study validates all of TCM is deceptive. The authors here did not test any particular herb in a clinical trial or even in the laboratory. Their work was done on computers and they essentially created maps. They had a long list of symptoms, a long list of genes and their corresponding proteins, and a long list of herbs used in TCM. They wanted to know if there was a dependable link between a symptom and the herb that was supposed to treat it, and if that link could be found through proteins. The thinking goes like this: a symptom like fever arises because certain genes are turned on, and these genes produce proteins which help create the fever. If the chemicals in the herb typically ...