China will fill this gap as well: https://www.hematologyadvisor.com/news/china-donates-500m-to...
But who knows, maybe if we keep the tariffs for another 10 years we can host the chemical manufacturing facilities that produce the drugs their biotechs sell to us after ours are no longer competitive.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Sad all round.
(Edit - downvoters, do you not agree that this is likely, or do you think that it's OK?
If the former, it's been done before so it seems very likely to me. If the latter then I have to say I agree with this take in scientific american - "To include TCM in the ICD is an egregious lapse in evidence-based thinking and practice."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...)
I consider that quite evil as it’s not evidence based and undermines actually good, useful medicine. Just as I would/do consider anyone trying to increase take up of homeopathy in poorer parts of the world to be evil.
In the case of China and TCM there appear to be nationalist and financial motives.
Beyond that, some of the remedies are actively harmful, and we know that alt medicine practitioners have often kept people away from vital treatment.
Edit: It's dumber and worse than I thought.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/10/chinese-traditiona...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3326972/ho...
https://rhinos.org/tough-issues/promotion-of-traditional-chi...
It actually is like they're sending TCM doctors to Africa!
I had no idea...
No doubt ingredient sourcing is in the mix too.
“A isn’t perfect therefore I choose to believe in B.”
Where A is an evidence-based discipline with some shortcomings and B is unevidenced woo. I’d rather something that works and can be proven to work over a good narrative, myself.
Several of your criticisms there also only apply to the American way of running a health system, that’s a choice that’s not taken everywhere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...
It just seems like such an undermining move to prop up an industry that anyways relies on distrust of established scientific and medical systems
2. Even if they didn't push it, the west has been stealing ("appropriating" in liberal speak) Ayurvedic remedies for years. Take turmeric for example. The GoI had to sue to keep turmeric patent free.
2. Ayurvedic and TCM largely refers to those things which haven't undergone clinical trials to understand their efficacy as prescribed medicines. Anything from that sphere which is clinically proven to work and is dispensed as prescription medicine just becomes part of medicine. It's not about "stealing" or whatever, it's about whether people should be given proven effective medicines or hopefully effective medicines, the former being what we should promote globally
Interestingly enough, RCTs of acupuncture (with sham needles) show pretty large effect sizes for many treatments but only in China, which is super weird. The most likely explanation is that the blinding doesn't work (which is a perennial problem in basically all RCTs), but it's interesting nonetheless.
Keep in mind that the Western system is not perfect either. Many good natural medicines are ignored by western countries because they have not undergone clinical trials. Why haven't they undergone clinical trials? Because that takes large amounts of money and no one is going to make that investment unless they can patent the molecule.
Of course, natural medicines that have been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years are not patentable, so no one will do a clinical trial for them. As a result, when you go to a doctor in a western country they are completely ignorant about natural medicines and will only prescribe drugs pushed by big pharma.
The Ramdevs and Patanjalis of the world could easily afford to do this and would boost their sales 100x if they could. They already sell unpatentable remedies and powders with great profit (but decamp to Western hospitals when they are actually sick)
Doctors test for deficiencies in vitamins and minerals and recommend cheap effective supplements to address them and other conditions all the frickin time.
My partner is currently taking completely unpatentable iron supplements for a deficiency and I am taking cheap, unpatentable psyllium husk for gut health and cholesterol management, both on the advice of our (Western, evidence-based) doctors.
This meme that ‘western’ doctors are only interested in peddling expensive pharmaceuticals and don’t look ‘holistically’ at patient health, or recommend cheap, effective treatments … it’s just not true at all.
Magnesium blood tests exist - https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/amp/article/magnesium-blood-...
Naturopathic ‘doctors’ have jobs because the credulous believe they’re something other than quacks. Naturopathy is a grab bag of unproven, alt-med bullshit and should be regarded as nothing more than charlatanry.
Your view of western medicine is nonsense driven by antipathy. Yes, there are problems with money from big Pharma corrupting the system. That doesn’t mean any of the woo-woo alt systems are any more real. They’re all far worse because they don’t even start with an evidence base.
The same could be said about your view of natural and traditional medicine.
> ‘Western’ doctors generally recommend things that work and are proven to work.
That's true of traditional medicine as well. The difference is how they are proven. Western medicines prove using a double blind study. It is expensive and you can't get funding for such studies unless an investor is assured of returns for their investment, which is only possible for novel, patentable medicines. And that means many natural medicines that work are ignored by the Western system. Traditional medicine on the other hand prove that something works not using double blind studies but 100s years of actual experience.
An example is magnesium. Doctors don't know that it works for muscle tightness and insomnia because no one has done a double blind study on it with thousands of patients. And nobody will because magnesium is not patentable. And so they prescribe Ambien CR, a very harmful and addictive drug. It is a very broken system, and you don't seem to want to acknowledge those limitations. (And no, no reliable tests exist for magnesium deficiency but that's a side point.)
> Naturopathy is a grab bag of unproven, alt-med bullshit and should be regarded as nothing more than charlatanry.
Yeah.. this attitude is the problem.
> They’re all far worse because they don’t even start with an evidence base.
They do, perhaps not in a way that satisfies you, but they do. The evidence is based on 100s of years of experience.
But there is evidence from all around the world that the Chinese government is actively pushing TCM, that they push it with the WHO, and that they are actively trying to open up markets for TCM “pharmaceuticals” and practice in African and other nations.
I put links in some of the sibling comments showing this.
China is not only a strong player in biotech. Their capability in chemical R&D and market transfer is very strong, too both in small and industrial scale. And let’s not speak about electronics …