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Comment by speff | Hacker News Reader

Traditional Chinese Medicine and International Classification of Diseases - for people who didn't click the link

TCM is mostly used by people in China too poor to afford standard medicine. If they've got the money, they go for non-TCM. That's all, nothing to do with the evil CCP bogeymen.

While this seems true and may be true within China, the Chinese government does push for this to be accepted around the world by pressuring for its inclusion in WHO documents, and is trying to open up new markets for TCM “Pharma” in poorer nations.

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.

It's not necessarily bad, these probably aren't hard figures but a GP once told me that of the cases he gets, if you do nothing much then 70% will get better by themselves, 20% will stay the same, and 10% will get worse (may have misremembered the numbers there). A lot of people just need a bit of reassurance and something to make them feel like they're doing something and they'll be OK, for which very affordable TCM is fine. Albert Schweitzer was once asked why he was OK with witch-doctors (as they were called then) practising outside his hospital, and he said they treated the stuff they could and sent the serious cases to him. It was an arrangement that worked for both sides.

I think that promoting quack medicine as if it was legitimate is a problem in itself.

Beyond that, some of the remedies are actively harmful, and we know that alt medicine practitioners have often kept people away from vital treatment.

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