The relationship between TCM and Western medicine

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Within China, there has been a great deal of cooperation between TCM practitioners and Western medicine, especially in the field of ethnomedicine. Chinese herbal medicine includes many compounds which are unused by Western medicine, and there is great interest in those compounds as well as the theories which TCM practitioners use to determine which compound to prescribe. For their part, advanced TCM practitioners in China are interested in statistical and experimental techniques which can better distinguish medicines that work from those that do not. One result of this collaboration has been the creation of peer reviewed scientific journals and medical databases on traditional Chinese medicine.

The relationship between TCM and Western medicine in the West is more contentious. While more and more medical schools are including classes on alternative medicine in their curricula, older Western doctors and scientists are far more likely than their Chinese counterparts to skeptically view TCM as archaic pseudoscience and superstition. This skepticism can come from a number of sources. For one, TCM in the West tends to be advocated either by Chinese immigrants or by those that have lost faith in conventional medicine. Many people in the West have a stereotype of the East as mystical and unscientific, which attracts those in the West who have lost hope in science and repels those who believe in scientific explanations. There have also been experiences in the West with unscrupulous or well meaning but improperly trained New Age "TCM practitioners" who have done people more harm than good in many instances.

As an example of the different roles of TCM in China and the West, a person with a broken bone in the West would never see a Chinese medicine practitioner or visit a martial art school to get the bone set, whereas this is routine in China. As another example, most TCM hospitals in China have electron microscopes and many TCM practitioners know how to use one.

This is not to say that Western medicine considers all practical outcomes of TCM techniques to be worthless. Many Western hospitals and clinics now offer Tai Chi Chuan or qigong classes as part of their community health programs. As well, TCM techniques have developed a range of medicines and techniques which have been demonstrated to cure some illnesses. The same, however, can be said of traditional European medicine, and of the medical practices of India, the Islamic world, pre-Columbian America and the Australian Aboriginal people. In all these cases, therapies have been discovered empirically rather than through the scientific method.

From Wikipedia