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Comment by StopTheWorld | Hacker News Reader

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou.

During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.

One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.

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> Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results.

TCM is interesting: There are countless different TCM preparations that do nearly nothing are can be actively harmful to the kidneys or liver, but every once in a while there is a a novel compound discovered in some plant somewhere that does something.

I can’t tell how much of this is because TCM has some treatments that actually work, or if it’s a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. I suspect it’s more of the latter.

Just because we have made innovations in the method of research and discovery doesn't mean that we should throw away everything that we had before.

Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations.

Just because the metaphors and models of explanations could be flawed doesn't mean the effects should be thrown out

Edit: I have a good friend, a scientist no less, who suffered from severe eczema and was completely let down by western medicine who was put through decades of progressively stronger and stronger steroids. Nothing worked. Eventually the doctors gave up and shrugged their shoulders and was advised to give "alternative medicine" a go. Desperate my friend visited a traditional Chinese doctor who was prepared to guide them through a rigorous exclusion diet while also preparing mystery herb soup and suddenly a lifetime of eczema subsided and became very manageable.

The older I get the more determined I find myself trying to glean the accrued wisdom of people who came before us...

> Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations.

Most people don’t care where, when, or why a concept was invented as long as it works.

Quibbling over who discovered it first or trying to drag the conversation back to who discovered it first is like the person who tries to claim credit for being into a band before they were popular: Nobody cares, they just want to enjoy it.

> The older I get the more determined I find myself trying to glean the accrued wisdom of people who came before us...

Going back to the actual article: There is a big illusion of accrued wisdom of the ancients in TCM that isn’t backed up by the research. There are occasional hits where a TCM preparation intersects with a truly active compound, but it should be raising red flags when TCM practitioners claim to have cures for everything and different TCM practitioners will come up with different answers for the same patient. When the first one doesn’t work they’ll have another answer the next visit, and the next visit, and so on.

An odd criticism. Would it be better if, when the treatment didn't work, they just prescribed the same thing?

I mean, most of TCM is pure bunkum, but blaming them for continuing to try to fix the problem is odd.

The criticism is that they claimed to have the solution the first time, instead of only claiming that they will try something functionally random.

A methodical process and a random or intuitive process only look like the same trial and error on the outside, and only to the (probably willfully) ignorant.

The trappings and ceremony of a theory and methodology are not actually a theory or methodology.

It doesn't do anyone any good to allow any confusion of the two.

Trial and error is not reproducible. Lack of a unifying theory also precludes reproducibility. We know better than that and should push other methods to these kinds of standards.

But TCM practitioners of the past and present have "landed" on successful treatment that go beyond just placebo and throwing that out because of the differing methods used in discovery and delivery is a shame when the more opportunistic thing to do would be to isolate and identify why the thing works.

Better yet, understanding why TCM continues to persist for reasons beyond just "culture" and trying to apply them back into our own prevailing methodologies would surely lead to better outcomes

"Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations."

These have been VASTLY improved and optimized compared to their traditional counterparts. Evidence-based trials with brain scans, and other methods.

For example, achieving strong vagus nerve stimulation on demand to activate the parasympathetic nervous system could take years(or they might never get there) to learn for traditional Buddhist meditation practitioners, and nowadays we get there in a few sessions of EMDR therapy.

A lot of scientists dabbled into pseudoscience but that doesn't invalidate their scientific accomplishment, and their scientific achievement doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit

> doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit

If you take an idea with a pseudoscientific origin, and you test it in a sound scientific way, you're doing science, not pseudoscience.

I am sure there are some truths in some thousand years of research, ala "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", but that doesn't validate the system or study as a whole.

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