If traditional medicine worked, it would be called medicine
Here's a problem:
- You can only bring profitable things to market.
- Anything used in the EU, China, or India for more than 20 years cannot be patented.
- Processes like FDA approval costs $$$
- If you receive FDA approval, you'll be undercut by vendors selling for commodity prices
There are other problems like it. Overall, the set of common medicines available in the US, China, and the EU differ quite a bit (e.g. you can't buy basic American antihistamines like diphenhydramine in Chinese pharmacies).
Really, the best way to solve this is public funding:
- Provide research grants for universities to run traditional medicines through RCTs, see which ones work, and publish results.
- Find some way to run the ones which work through FDA without private funding.
That could separate the good from the bad. My hope is a summit like this helps do that.
Slowly but consistently, thanks to careful testing, there is some flow of "plant medicine" application from "traditional medicine" to medicine.
Not sure that homeopathy, acupuncture, etc will be able to survive careful scientific verification to become part of the modern medicine.
These have been tested and... surprise(!), never perform better than placebo.
The best than can be said about them is that at least they aren't actively damaging unless they stop the afflicted you seeking 'conventional'(?) treatment.
Anyway... IIRC the current consensus is that the "more extreme" the intervention appears the more beneficial the placebo effect is, so...
We're not a shining example of physical or mental health here in the west.
There are a lot of room for things that work, but cannot meet the control or confidence guarantees of official medicine. The problem is that grey area leaves room for (1) really bad treatments (2) idiocracy in attempting to solve serious issues with useless techniques.