In this blog post, we examine whether attempting to prove the scientific identity of TCM is meaningful and whether it can improve the competitiveness of TCM. We argue that TCM should look for meaning from a different perspective than modern medicine.
The notion of “qi,” “acupuncture points,” and “yin-yang harmony” may seem absurd at this point in our scientific age. Chinese medicine has been practiced for thousands of years, but in modern times, its efficacy has been questioned and it is losing its relevance as a medicine. This is because modern medicine is based on a thoroughly scientific mindset and has accumulated knowledge from anatomy onwards, whereas Chinese medicine consists of unscientific theories such as “qi” and “yin-yang five elements theory.” For this reason, traditional Japanese medicine has already been absorbed and integrated into modern medicine, and the position of Chinese medicine has been significantly lowered.
In response to this loss of public trust, the TCM community has recently been promoting EBM (Evidence-Based Medicine). Evidence-based medicine is a method of organizing medical decisions based on scientific evidence (clinical) obtained through well-designed research. It is a method of verifying the reliability of diagnostics and the effectiveness of treatments through thoroughly designed clinical trials. TCM has borrowed this approach and is attempting to demonstrate that TCM is a scientific discipline and can be trusted by uncovering the mechanisms of its treatments. But does simply uncovering the mechanisms of a treatment make it scientific? Since TCM is fundamentally built on theories such as “qi” and the “yin-yang five elements theory,” can we really say that TCM is inherently scientific with a proof that does not take into account theories?
In this article, we will examine the question of whether it is meaningful to try to prove that TCM is scientific and whether it can increase the competitiveness of TCM.
Before we get to the point, let’s clarify the concept of ‘scientific’, which is the key word in this article. Science refers to the natural sciences in a narrow sense, and to a logical system of knowledge or inquiry to rationally understand natural and human phenomena in a broad sense. In this article, “science” is the study of the structure, properties, and laws of matter, which is closer to the former. With this in mind, let’s discuss the question of whether TCM should be scientific, i.e., a discipline that investigates the structure of matter and uses it for treatment.
First, let’s take a look at the evidence in favor of the thesis that Chinese medicine is scientific. One of the most prominent examples of the scientific nature of Chinese medicine is the discovery of the analgesic mechanism of acupuncture. A few years ago, Nature Neuroscience, a top journal in the field of neuroscience, published a paper showing that the analgesic effect of acupuncture is not a placebo effect but can be explained scientifically. According to the paper, a signaling molecule called adenosine is produced around the cells stimulated by acupuncture, and it attaches to receptors on nociceptors, inhibiting chronic pain and relieving it. TCM practitioners point to this research and claim that this is just one of the mechanisms of TCM, and that it’s only a matter of time before TCM is proven to be completely scientific. However, this is simply a test of the science of the treatment, not the science of the underlying principles or theories of TCM. If you want to be scientific, there has to be a way to verify the existence of things like “qi” or “acupuncture points,” which are fundamental principles of TCM.
In fact, there are studies that recognize the effectiveness of acupuncture but cast doubt on the existence of “acupuncture points. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by German professor Klaus Linde and colleagues, Linde investigated how well acupuncture relieved pain in migraine sufferers. He placed acupuncture needles on the correct acupuncture points in one group, and randomly placed them in another group, and the results showed no difference between the two groups. This suggests that the “act of placing the needles” has an analgesic effect rather than the acupuncture points themselves. This is a basis for denying the existence of acupuncture points. After all, without a scientific basis for the basic principles of Chinese medicine, the science of the treatment cannot be clearly demonstrated.
Some people may ask: “Why do we accept Einstein’s relativity or quantum mechanics as science, which is hard to accept with common sense and invisible to the eye, but declare the qi and acupuncture points of Chinese medicine as unscientific? ‘ The feeling when first learning about relativity or quantum mechanics may be similar to that of learning about the principles of Chinese medicine in that they are so groundbreaking that they may sound absurd. However, in science, when a groundbreaking theory is accepted as orthodoxy, it must be supported by evidence. For example, in quantum electrodynamics, the value of the magnetic moment of an electron was predicted theoretically and measured experimentally, and the error between the theoretical prediction and the experimental value was very small. In science, a breakthrough theory needs to be supported by evidence. The empirical data for TCM theories is too sparse to match the groundbreaking nature of the theory.
Therefore, I believe that Chinese medicine is close to non-science. However, this does not mean that I am advocating that Chinese medicine should disappear. Chinese medicine has the potential to cure diseases that modern medicine cannot cure, and its significance lies in the fact that it improves not only a person’s disease but also his or her constitution. In other words, the significance of Chinese medicine is not to be found in its being scientific. If you look for the significance of Chinese medicine in its being scientific, then it is no different from modern medicine, and it cannot beat modern medicine, which was developed based on science from the beginning. In recent years, multinational pharmaceutical companies actively try to embrace folk medicine in their respective countries if they find it effective. If the therapeutic mechanism of Chinese medicine is revealed and it is proved to be effective, it will be accepted and actively utilized by modern medicine, but at that moment, the treatment will not be that of Chinese medicine, but that of modern medicine.
Therefore, if Chinese medicine is to survive, it must not be held to the standards of modern natural science. “We must admit that Chinese medicine is not a science in the narrow sense of the word, nor is it a science in the sense of modern natural science, because it cannot be described mathematically and cannot be verified in the laboratory.” However, we must recognize that Chinese medicine is a science in the broad sense of the word, a kind of modeling science. If modern medicine is the study of the physical structure of the human body and the discovery of physical and chemical mechanisms, Chinese medicine has never been a study of material structure. Instead of a material model, it uses the method of thought model to understand and treat human beings and life by intuitively feeling and experiencing, in other words, it looks at human beings and life from a completely different perspective than the science of physical reality.
It’s not that long ago that humans created disciplines centered on scientific thinking and used the scientific method as a measure of trust, and we can’t say that modern science has understood everything in the world yet. In this context, does it make sense to blindly trust science and rely solely on modern medicine, and is it right to be frustrated by labeling diseases that modern medicine can’t cure as “incurable”? I think that’s where TCM comes into play, and I think that’s where its significance and competitiveness lies: in trying to save lives with a completely different perspective and methodology than modern medicine, for diseases that modern medicine has abandoned.
It is true that it is still difficult to fully trust Chinese medicine, but to bring in modern natural science to solve this problem and claim that Chinese medicine is a scientific discipline is to ignore its essential principles. TCM should not be recognized for being ‘scientific’, but for being ‘different’ from modern medicine. The future of TCM should be centered on this, and only then will it be meaningful as an original medicine.
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