Your experiences with traditional Chinese medicine (中医)?

[tooironic]

Been having some troubles with mouth ulcers recently and my Chinese friend bought me some 牛黄解毒片 to help, as they say in traditional Chinese medicine, to "relieve internal heat" (解毒). Yes, it's derived from 牛黄 - ox bezoar. Be careful not to get it mixed up with the term 黄牛 ("ticket scalper") as I did. Previously I had been using 桂林西瓜霜, another TCM product, a kind of powder made from watermelons, which had worked quite well at helping them go away more quickly.

 

About the effectiveness of the 牛黄解毒片, I'll report back later. In the meantime I'd like to hear from you about any experiences you might have had with traditional Chinese medicine - good, or bad.

 

(BTW, I've also tried 板蓝根 - a kind of herbal infusion - when I came down with a cold, but I found it wasn't as effective as Lemsip, another type of medicinal drink containing large amounts of paracetamol and other drugs, that's ubiquitous in Australia.)

[Demonic_Duck]

My Chinese friends frequently buy me TCM stuff when I'm sick. I thank them for their kindness and take it dutifully alongside "western" medicines. I can't say I've ever noticed any effects above and beyond what I'd attribute to the "western" medicines. Maybe if I actually believed they'd work I'd be getting a helpful extra dose of placebo effect...

[Tianjin42]

I will happily take that placebo effect. Ha.

I am interested in TCM but feel that there is a lot of rubbish around. Also I feel there is an issue with definition. 西药 and 中药 doesn't really correlate with alternative medicine (which by my understanding means a treatment that has not been tested or has been tested and has no discernible effect).

It seems there are some TCM treatments with benefits but I would be happier if they have been well tested (eg double blinds etc.).

My GP in the UK had done a little research and informed me that he felt TCM had some good treatments for skin complaints in particular.

At the same time it is important we are critical. Some of the basic premises TCM rest upon are obviously misguided and we must remember that TCM as we know it is the result of a modernisation push that eroded away many of the more outlandish theories (but not the treatments). I suggest to my Chinese friends that the best way to advance Chinese culture in this arena would not be to blindly defend TCM but rather to test it. Let's not forget this is a massive industry and not without danger.

[hedwards]

I was sick a couple of times when in China and I'd usually be given antibiotics and some sort of herbal remedy to go along with it. Chinese doctors are really quite good, I found that I recovered quite quickly. But, it's always hard to say how well a treatment is working, unless it fails completely.

[imron]

No comments about TCM, but the best remedy for mouth ulcers I know of is salt. Put some on your finger, and then directly on the ulcer and hold it there for a minute or two. It stings like nothing else, but do that 2-3 times a day and the ulcer will go in a couple of days.

Also reduce intake of sugary foods - which probably includes many of the dishes you get in restaurants.

[tysond]

Personally I don't trust any medicine that won't do double blind trials. I also have doubts around the fact that many Chinese medicines require you to take over 20 pills a day. Reminds me of the storY of when Alka-Seltzer started showing people popping two pills in their advertisements (instead of one) and sales soon doubled.

I do not subscribe to the belief that there are ancient wisdoms in Chinese science that the west has yet to discover. But if you believe it works you may get some benefit. But i try not to argue with people about their beliefs. Beliefs by their very nature cannot be argued.

[imron]

Personally I don't trust any medicine that won't do double blind trials.

Although I generally agree with this, how do you double blind sticking needles in someone?  It's not like you can just give the other group sugar pills.

[tysond]

> Although I generally agree with this, how do you double blind sticking needles in someone?

 

I'll agree this one is tough.  Like leeches and bloodletting.  

 

[ edit: Although I have one idea - how about simply measuring lifespans of those who eschew real medicine for acupunture?  E.g. cancer sufferers.  Although it's difficult because when people's life is actually on the line the belief in acupuncture tends to decline rapidly ]

[liuzhou]

"I have always been fairly cynical about so-called alternative therapies. I like old fashioned drugs thank you very much.

About 15 years ago, I was sitting here in Liuzhou suffering from rheumatism in my left arm. This was nothing new. I had been suffering for years. It became so painful sometimes that I couldn't move the arm under its own steam, but had to use my right hand to manoeuvre it to where I wanted it to be.

One day a friend was visiting and noticed this. I explained and she said,

“I can cure that.”

I didn't want to be too sceptical, so I just mumbled something about her being an anthropologist, not a pharmacist and please pass the pain killers.

A week later she returned to Liuzhou after a visit to Nanning and came to see me again. She announced that she had bought what she needed for my cure. I thought, “OK. Nothing to lose. Let her mess about and after she's gone, I'll be back on the distalgesic.” Then she explained the process.

She had a small bottle containing alcohol in which some herbs had been infused. The bottle also contained a short length of string. She fished out the string, set fire to it, blew it out and applied the still glowing end to my arm.

“Aaagh! That burnt!”

She relit the string and went through the same process several times, applying the hot string to various acupuncture points on my arm and shoulder.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” she said.

This went on for several days. At the end of her treatment my arm looked terrible – covered in burn marks – but the rheumatic pain had gone. And it has never come back. Years of suffering were burned away."

The above is extracted and updated from my blog here. It contains more information. Still cynical though.

[realmayo]

those who eschew real medicine

 

I'm not sure it's so binary. Lots of the enthusiasm for TCM in the west come from people who have chronic problems that western medicine cannot solve.

 

I used to think the excessive-internal-heat stuff sounded daft but then I thought: there's a belief in the west that eating lots of chocolate and sweet things as a teenager can make acne worse. And that diet can affect certain health conditions. Which is basically the same principles as lots of TCM.

 

Plus western medicine has some very peculiar ideas too when it comes to diet, e.g. that animal fats are bad for you, or trans-fat-margarine is good for you. I wouldn't be confident that "we" are scientifically right and "they" are suffering from mass delusion.

[淨土極樂]

There's no such thing as "western medicine", just like there's no "western chemistry" or "western mathematics". We have scientifically approved and extensively tested medical methods and substances that are used world wide, and then there's alternative medicine, usually coming from traditional beliefs, many countries have their own. Chinese medicine is just a kind of alternative medicine. Not that different from babushkas in remote Russian villages healing people (often for free) with rare herbs. Yes, sometimes it really works, but this is not science.

[roddy]

On double blind studies for acupuncture - I was under the impression acupuncturists don't just whack the needles in any old where, they use specific points. So do that for half the folk, then a couple of inches away for the other half. 

[realmayo]

@淨土極樂 Okay but "scientifically approved and extensively tested medical methods" in the west -- on certain topics -- provide medical advice which then gets reversed some years later. That's to say, it's completely wrong!

 

Every age and every era thinks its ways must be the best: this is human nature, but it can lead to overconfidence in our rightness. To reiterate: scientifically approved and extensively tested medical methods produced the advice to eat transfats and avoid butter, but now the advice is that transfats give you cancer. So we're not as clever as we think we are. Or rather, science is conducted by people and people make mistakes.

 

I'm sure not too long ago people would have said acupuncture was nonsense. But now that we finally understand more about how it works on the body, people are less dismissive.

 

Having said all that, TCM does look open to far more quackery and exploitation of reversion to the mean or the placebo effect.

[Tianjin42]

I think this issue is in some ways a microcosm for larger western/China debates. Many 'westerners' are hamstrung by their own critical thinking whereas some Chinese are confident in the face of a relative absence of critical thinking. This is often just struck down as culture difference but that is unfair.

There are indeed mistakes in western medicine but the fact it isn't a perfect science doesn't validate a system based partly on superstition. With Chinese friends I do explain that using 'western' and 'Chinese' tags for medicine isn't useful and instead 'medicine' and 'alternative medicine' for untested or ineffective treatments is better.

[Tianjin42]

In terms of acupuncture, I seem to recall a study with retractable needles that obtained similar results as the real deal penetrating the skin. Will try to find that out.

[realmayo]

using 'western' and 'Chinese' tags for medicine isn't useful and instead 'medicine' and 'alternative medicine' for untested or ineffective treatments is better. 

 

I'm not sure I agree. Medicine basically refers to diagnosing and treating illness.

 

I'm certainly not saying that because western medicine is flawed, Chinese medicine must be right.

 

However, think of little Johnny 2000 years ago whose mother tells him that Zeus doesn't like people flying kites and if he's nearby he'll zap them from the sky. Little Johnny doesn't believe in Zeus so he goes and flies his kite during the next thunderstorm, and ends up hit by lightening. His mother had made observations and interpreted the meaning behind them incorrectly, but her observations stood. Who is to say we're not sometimes a bit like little Johnny: we recognise that all that stuff about Zeus is nonsense but we haven't learned about electricity yet, so maybe we shouldn't automatically write off all collected observations  .

 

Or more simply: Eat shit:

 

Chinese medicine historically prescribes eating the shit of other people, sometimes.

Western medicine has recently decided this is a good thing:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27503660

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037

[ouyangjun]

No comment on my side.  But I believe it was a Sinica podcast on Chinese medicine that said, and I'm going to paraphrase here, "Medicine that is proven to work is just called medicine"

[Demonic_Duck]

There's no such thing as "western medicine", just like there's no "western chemistry" or "western mathematics". We have scientifically approved and extensively tested medical methods and substances that are used world wide, and then there's alternative medicine, usually coming from traditional beliefs, many countries have their own. Chinese medicine is just a kind of alternative medicine. Not that different from babushkas in remote Russian villages healing people (often for free) with rare herbs. Yes, sometimes it really works, but this is not science.

 

This is why I put "western" in scare quotes in my post, but it's worth reiterating. Unfortunately, the debate tends to be framed in terms of TCM vs. western medicine, 中医与西医.

 

 

 

No comment on my side.  But I believe it was a Sinica podcast on Chinese medicine that said, and I'm going to paraphrase here, "Medicine that is proven to work is just called medicine"

That podcast (which is certainly a worthwhile listen, as are most of the Sinica podcasts), was in turn quoting the wonderful* Tim Minchin.

 

*Some people can't stand him, but I'm a fan myself.

[hedwards]

I think that anybody who thinks that the "Western" medicine is scientifically proven either doesn't know what science is or is hopelessly naive about the quality of medical research. Doctors can't give people things they believe to be harmful in order to see if it's actually harmful and they can't withhold a treatment they believe to be effective from test subjects. Consequently, it's almost completely impossible to rule out confounding factors and get to the heart of the matter.

 

I've had a number of health conditions over the years where the doctors had no idea whatsoever as to what to do about them and none of them were particularly strange disorders. Most of them were the result of the Western diet including poisonous "foods" like wheat and dairy. As long as I avoid those, the symptoms go away and don't return until I start eating them again.

The worst sham though is probably the low fat diet scam. Eating a low fat diet gives a slight reduction in death from cardiovascular disease which is more than made up for by an increase in cancer and all other sorts of deaths.

 

TCM isn't scientific in the way that we generally think of as scientific, but it's been around a really long time and it does tend to work. Mainly because over the centuries practitioners weren't paid if the patients weren't being cured. And the fact that the practitioners themselves were mostly getting their treatments from the same set of treatments, so there was an incentive to get it right.

 

Ultimately, they both have uses, but anybody who thinks that "Western" medicine is more reliable, more proven or more established by science really needs to crack the books and start reading about what's going on, because medical science is probably the least reliable of the scientific disciplines.

[Michaelyus]

Uh, 解毒 is "detoxify" in idiomatic English and "resolve toxin" in standard TCM-speak. 清热 refers to "clearing heat", and 泻火 refers to "draining fire". 
 

The standard thing to do with 内热 "internal heat" is to 清 it, not to *解 it. In practice though I don't think 内热 is common in diagnostic situations; it is usually manifested / or seen as 内火 by that time.