You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.
—Tim Minchin
—Tim Minchin
Artemisinin (qinghaosu) from artemisia annua. This won the 2015 Nobel Prize, and is now the cornerstone of global malaria therapy.
Arsenic trioxide, the purified form of the TCM mineral pishuang, now a very common treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia. Often curative in a single dose: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221304891...
Camptothecin from camptotheca acuminata, precursor of topotecan and irinotecan for solid tumours.
Ephedrine from ephedra sinica -- template for modern bronchodilators and decongestants.
Many others. Omacetaxine, minnelide, and more.
Very often, the first thing a medicinal chemist seeking new drug templates does is look to herbs that are used by indigenous populations or in "traditional" medicine systems. There's an entire journal dedicated to this:
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharma...
See P5-6 in section "The implausibility problem" - which points out that in order for the treatment to be effective it had to be refined into a form that is not rapidly eliminated from the body.
When you have thousands of years of people writing down their folk cures, sooner or later somebody will be right.
Wasn't the entire idea behind evidence-based medicine to start putting traditional western treatments to the test and check if they actually work? I think we do take traditional western methods quite seriously, and we should do the same with TCM.
With regard to your bark example, right here in the thread someone points out: "E.g. willow bark was used to treat pain for thousands of years, which led to the discovery of aspirin."
But no, at a normal conversational level- most the people around me (American midwest) would wait for the rest of the joke if I said I was going to the apothecary to get something for my headache.
Selling hundreds of "herbs and natural solutions": https://www.gnc.com/herbs-natural-supplements/
Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up.
Yeah, lovastatin comes from red yeast rice, which is also TCM. The other statins are downstream of it.
> Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up.
I agree 100%. But natural products are -- and always have been -- the great repository of drug templates. All modern pharmacopoeias owe a real debt to TCM in particular.
Instead of complaining like the guy who wrote the article in OP, it's best to try and take what's good and discard what's bad, without preconceptions or prejudice.
Meanwhile if someone told me "yeah eating a bunch of ginger when you have a cold is good to you because ginger has a bunch of stuff that's good for your body then" I don't have a particularly hard time believing it. Sure! Why not!
The article's critique about symptom management rather than disease management is legit though. And the precision for actual research is good. But at the end of the day if my body needs some stuff for symptom management and some TCM strategy involves me giving myself like 20x the dose of it... well it's something, isn't it? Though you could argue about it "deserving" credit or not.
Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.
> well it's something, isn't it?
It's probably not!
If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.
In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.
It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false.
It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.
Sure, but that doesn't come with an entire theory about Chi energy lines, and no one claims this is "medicine" either (other than perhaps jokingly).
That's really the key thing. If you want to get a massage, or aromatherapy, or Reiki or whatever just because you like it, then that's fine. I'm happy for you! Massages even have proven benefits. Some may have benefits that are not yet proven. If you start claiming it will cure your cancer however...
This is also why I don't buy "detox" drinks that some restaurants have, even though some of them seem quite nice. The "detox" is just bollocks. I once even saw "detox" coriander leaves in the store. I like coriander. Maybe it's even good for you (I don't know). But "detox" coriander? Just, ugh...
But it takes discernment to know which unproven thing might work and won't hurt though. TCM sounds more dangerous than not because the herbs you can get will be unregulated and possibly contaminated.
I'm not familiar with the history of meditation or mindfulness, but I've seen people claim some pretty ridiculous things about yoga, perhaps the most ludicrous was someone claiming that some positions will prevent certain cancers due to "massaging your organs". Yoga absolutely has benefits but that's just nonsense.
2min58
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiB...
I think comedy trends have fashions. At the time comedians made jokes about religion, now they make jokes about trans people, or about being "canceled". When you narrow the range of jokes you might increase the joke collision rate.