Traditional Chinese medicine

…But that didn't matter to me, eventually went to Nanjing to attend school K. In this school, I knew natural sciences, math, geography, history, art, and physical health for the first time. Biology was not included, but we saw books like On the Whole Body and On Chemical Hygiene. I remembered arguments and prescriptions of the old doctors, compared them with that of today's, and slowly realized TCM is deceit, willful or not, but also felt great pity for the patients and their families scammed. From translated history I also knew Japanese Reformation has much roots in Western medicine. …

Traditional Chinese medicine (or TCM) refers to the theories and practices of diagnosis and healing developed historically in China. Beginning in ancient times, its influence spread to neighbouring countries such as Korea and Japan, and largely shaped their traditional medicine. More recently, TCM has become popular as an alternative medicine in Europe and North America.

Like much Chinese lore, such as feng shui and the martial arts, Chinese medicine is based on the qi (or chi, 氣) principle of energy. Qi is said to be channelled through a complex system of meridians in the body, and illnesses are believed to be related to blocked or unbalanced flow of qi. Common treatments include acupressure, acupuncture, acupuncture bloodletting, reflexology, and herbal medicine, though treatments can also be of inorganic, animal or even mythologic origin (clawed human, one-footed monster, sprite/elf/naiad, and dryad). In one study, 260 TCM products sold in California were analyzed for adulterants: 32% contained drugs and/or heavy metals.

Alleged mythical origins
Fuxi (or Paoxi, 伏羲) was a legendary ruler to whom many fundamental aspects of domestic life (animal domestication, cooking, etc.) have been ascribed, including medical philosophy and the I Ching. One of the who is variously considered as deity or a god-emperors is considered by the the Chinese to be the founder of Chinese medicine: Shennong (神農 or 神农) is claimed to have discovered herbalism and to have written the first treatise on herbs, the  (神農本草經). In addition, he was said to have discovered, or invented, tea, the hoe, the plow, the axe, wells, irrigation, preserving seeds in boiled horse urine, the 24 hours of the day, the calendar, the weekly farmers' market, the harvest festival, pulse measuring, moxibustion and acupuncture. Additionally, he was said to have known the secret to immortality and the transmutation of substances into gold.

Religion was deeply intertwined with Chinese medicine, particularly in the earliest years, and it included sorcery, divination (I Ching), astrology In ancient times, doctors were referred to as priest-doctors (Wu I). Spirituality remains an important part of Chinese medicine

The Chinese have a reverence for authority, in large part due to the "Five Relationships" of Confucianism. This likely is a source of resistance to change and acceptance of evidence-based medicine.

Pre-modern history
Chinese medicine is based upon four ancient, mutually-contradictory classics:
 * 1) (黃帝內經) or Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor or Inner Canon (c. 100 CE)
 * 2) (傷寒論) or Treatise on Cold Damage Diseases or Book of Cold Damage (c. 200 CE)
 * 3) (金匱要略) or Essential Prescriptions from the Golden Cabinet or Golden Casket (c. 200 CE)
 * 4) Various texts of 'warmth-factor diseases' (known as wenbing, 温病) (17th-19th centuries CE)

Proto- and Pseudo-Science
While today, what has worked in the 'fields' of herbalism has been added to pharmacology and what hasn't worked has been discarded, prior to the scientific method, there really wasn't a good way to gather reliable information. Various medicine men and priests and the like would have made an observation and passed it on to other healers, but not have the resources or education to actually test these observations. Some of the herbs and such would work (for example, willow bark tea), others did not. But without the resources of a modern university research department, better forms of acquiring knowledge weren't really practical. Various herbal and folk remedies that relied on limited observation and lacked rigorous testing were protosciences rather than pseudo-sciences. That is, "not yet sciences", rather than "never sciences".

There were indeed some important discoveries made by Chinese medicine. The most important of which was "variolation" (vaccination); exposing someone to a weak form of smallpox (or cowpox) to prevent that person succumbing later on to a deadlier form of smallpox. This folk remedy happened to work, and spread to India, then to the Ottoman Empire and then to Europe. This makes vaccine denialists that adhere to other forms of TCM a rather strange breed.

In China
Access to Western medicine in China was especially difficult in China up through the first half of the 20th century due to poverty and wars (particularly the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese civil war). During the Chinese Civil War, the People's Liberation Army used Chinese medicine by necessity for lack of reliable access to anything else. Following the victory of the People's Liberation Army, Mao Zedong saw the importance of maintaining the employment of the hundreds of thousands of people involved in various aspects of Chinese medicine, so as to assure social stability. Mao laid out abstract goals (or slogans) for the integration of Chinese and Western medicine, the details of which were left to Chinese Communist Party officials:
 * 1945-50: The Co-operation of Chinese and Western Medicines
 * 1950-58: The Unification of Chinese and Western Medicines
 * 1950-53: Chinese Medicine Studies Western Medicine
 * 1954-58: Western Medicine Studies Chinese Medicine
 * 1958-: The Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine

Evidence suggests that as early as 1954, Mao had doubts about the effectiveness of Chinese medicine. Both Mao and Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, were very skeptical of the usefulness of Chinese medicine. Mao was also ignorant of modern medicine. Because Mao was privately skeptical of Chinese medicine and ignorant of modern medicine, his promotion of integrative medicine was entirely a political maneuver. Because Mao was skeptical of Chinese medicine, his strong and continuous promotion of Chinese medicine was intentionally promoting nationalism while sacrificing the physical health of the nation. The nationalist aspect Chinese medicine was made explicit by: The problem with relying on nationalist science is that there is no such thing. Science is based on a universal, the scientific method. Soviet science, while excellent in some regards, was deficient in others due to reliance on ideology and dialectical materialism.
 * 1) Mao's use of the slogan, "China's medicine and pharmacology is a great treasure-house!!" (中国药学是一个伟大的宝库!! zhongguo yiyaoxue shi yige weida de baoku)
 * 2) a Western medicine trained physician in the revolutionary army who eventually became director of the People's Government Ministry of Health,  endorsed the idea of nationalist-based sciences. He Cheng was particularly interested in Soviet science.



It was during this period (roughly mid-1950s to mid-1960s) that Chinese medicine became standardized, resolving or glossing over the contradictory elements of the four ancient texts. In 1955, the term 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' (in capital letters) began to be used to refer to this standardized version to the English-speaking world; notably, it was first used as a political term. The term in Chinese however remained the same as it was in pre-revolutionary China, 中医 (zhongyi) as it always had, which just translates to 'Chinese medicine', a term that was used starting in the 19th century to contrast it with Western medicine (西医, xiyi). It was also during this period that the idea of integrated medicine developed, based on Mao's sloganeering, the mixing Chinese and Western medicine. Other non-standardized forms of Chinese medicine are still practiced both within the People's Republic of China (PRC) and in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Despite the death of Mao, the rise of capitalism, the general lack of evidence supporting TCM, and the preference of Chinese citizens for TCM only for minor ailments, the Chinese government continues to actively promote TCM within China and abroad,  likely based on a sense of nationalism.

In the West
TCM became more widely noticed in the West beginning in the 1970s. The biggest publicity generator for China at this time was acupuncture analgesia for surgery, which was publicized by James Reston, a New York Times reporter who accompanied Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to China in 1971, in preparation for President Richard Nixon's visit in 1972. Reston had an emergency appendectomy while in China using conventioanal anesthesia, and received post-surgical acupuncture analgesia, which he described as causing diversionary pain. Acupuncture analgesia has been portrayed elsewhere as occurring during surgery, but this has largely been debunked: when acupuncture has been used during surgery, it has been used in addition to chemical sedatives.

Notably, the first three Western textbooks on TCM following Reston's article  were based on a 1958 PRC textbook, The Outline of TCM (中医学概论, Zhongyixue Gailun) that was filtered through revolutionary communist fervor.

TCM has become popular in North America and Europe during recent decades, largely due to the growing popularity of CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and the New Age preoccupation with other Eastern woo such as feng shui, Chinese astrology, Reiki and Zen Buddhism. As with most of these fads, the most common variants of TCM popularised in the west tend to be simplified and bastardised versions of authentic TCM, and are often bundled with other forms of CAM. For example, Chinese medicine centers in the UK and USA often offer non-Chinese complementary therapies such as hypnotherapy and homeopathy, alongside Chinese herbalism and acupuncture.

However, just because one remedy works does not mean all the others work. Each remedy or herb gets tested; those that work become part of medicine, while those that don't get discarded. Keeping the remedies that are unproven or have been proven not to work is instead pseudoscience.

Materia medica
The (本草綱目) or Compendium of Materia Medica was first published in the 1578 by  (李時珍). An early book was written in 1505 by the physician Liu Wentai under orders from Emperor Xiaozong, titled Bencao Pinhui Jingyao (Collection of the Essential Medical Herbs of Materia Medica), but this book was not available to the general public and is not now well-known.

The Bencao Gangmu has remained in use continuously since its publication, and was replaced in China by the 10-volume Zhong Hua Ben Cao (中华本草, Encyclopedia of Chinese Materia Medica) in 1999. The now-official Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China was published in 2005.

Controversial and dangerous ingredients used in TCM
TCM ingredients can range from common plants, such as dandelion, persimmon, and mint, to weird or even dangerous stuff. Some things found in TCM include genitals of various animals (including dogs, tigers, seals, oxen, goats, and deer), bear bile (commonly obtained by means of slow, inhumane extraction methods), and (genuine) snake oil. It is worth noting that the sale and use of all of these animal ingredients is illegal in many parts of Asia, Europe, North America and almost everywhere else. New methods of combating the use of these illegal animal parts have been discussed. Urine, feces, placenta and other human-derived medicines were traditionally used but some may no longer be in use.



Some of the dangerous ingredients include lead, calomel (mercurous chloride), cinnabar (red mercuric sulfide), asbestos (including asbestiform actinolite, sometimes erroneously called aconite ) realgar (arsenic), and birthwort (Aristolochia spp.). Bloodletting is also practiced. Bizarrely, lead oxide, cinnabar, and calomel are said to be good for detoxification. Lead oxide is also supposed to help with ringworms, skin rashes, rosacea, eczema, sores, ulcers, and intestinal parasites, cinnabar allegedly helps you live longer, and asbestos is used (including in powder form) for treating impotence, spermatorrhea, premature ejaculation, colic, muscle cramps, prostatitis, endometritis, as well as for kidney-warming and yang-fortifying. Admittedly, the amounts of cinnabar and calomel used in TCM are small enough that the damage they cause is usually reversible.

A 1998 study of 260 imported Asian patent medicines collected in California found that 14 had labels with declared pharmaceutical ingredients. Of 243 products that were chemically analyzed, 17 had undeclared pharmaceuticals (including ephedrine, chlorpheniramine, methyltestosterone, and phenacetin). Of the 251 products that were chemically analyzed, 24 contained lead in the range of 10 to 319 ppm, 35 contained arsenic in the range of 20.4 to 114,000 ppm, and 35 contained mercury in the range of 22.4 to 5070 ppm. By way of comparison, the United States Pharmacopoeia limits heavy metals in pharmaceuticals to 30 ppm in most cases.

Sites selling or promoting TCM remedies often lump all their products or recommended treatments under the generic term "herbs". However, many of these herbal products are really of mineral or otherwise non-herbal origin. These "herbs" are sometimes listed by their Chinese or mineral names (which people don't really recognize). Instead of listing "lead", they list a "herb" called mi tuo seng or "galena"; instead of listing asbestos, they list yang qi shi, and so on.

Lethal substitution
TCM allows for the substitution of ingredients that have the same or similar names in Chinese. In Belgium, a weight-loss spa using TCM herbs gave its clients herbal supplements containing birthwort, and as a result, more than 100 out of 1800 of its patients developed kidney failure, and several also developed urothelial and kidney cancers. In this case, the relatively safe Stephania tetrandra (漢防己, Han Fang Ji) was intended for the clients, but the lethal Aristolochia fangchi (廣防己, Guang Fang Ji) was given to them instead.

Environmental impact
In TCM, endangered species such as rhinos, pangolins, sharks, seahorses, manta rays, lions, leopards and tigers are highly prized; rhino horns are considered panaceas which can cure everything from arthritis to cancer, even though studies have shown they do nothing. Because of this demand, poachers hunt these animals for their body parts in order to sell them to TCM users. Since the 1970s, rhino populations have dropped 90%; while this number may not be entirely due to TCM, it can plausibly be said that TCM is significantly contributing to the extinction of endangered species by encouraging the use of these clearly ineffective as well as illegally and unsustainably sourced substances.

Here be dragons
Some also grind up dinosaur fossils (mistakenly thought by some to be "dragon bones") to be used as medicines. Given that dinosaur fossils have undergone complete mineralization, these "dragon bones" could not be any more effective than eating rocks.

Bernard Read analyzed several dragon medicines used in TCM: