[arjo129]

Last I checked homeopathy was western. i think your bias towards eastern medicine would be better founded if you were to say faith healing rather than eastern. Within eastern medicine one also finds people who used early forms of experimentation to derive working cures. Examples of working medical cures include boswellia used to treat bursitis, artemisin used to treat malaria. Also both Chinese and Indians had developed anaesthetic before Europeans. Similarly the procedure of rhinoplasty was developed in India. When the British came in western surgeons studied the technique and took it back to Europe. In fact hygiene was a critical part of the ayurvedic surgeons life well before Europeans realized the importance of hygiene in surgery. Of course there are a lot bogus stuff in eastern cures as well but in the west you have stuff like homeopathy. I think the key take away is that you cannot divide by east and west. We are after all human and each culture has their own contribution to the face of the earth.

[jernfrost]

You are trivializing the significant difference modern western science based medicine and earlier medicine. Of course people could come up with all sorts of practical solutions to various ailments and conditions through trial, error and observations. That however does not make it scientific. There is no scientific theory in you Chinese and Indian examples on which to make predictions and explanations. One example would be e.g. germ theory. It allows one to make predictions about things not yet observed. It helps explain why washing your hands is good. Now you can learn this from practical observations, but if you have no idea that the reason is due to germs being removed, then it prevents you from experimenting with and finding alternative cleaning agents or practices.

[averagewall]

Western medicine is often found by trial and error too. Scientists perform tests of thousands of compounds just in case one of them happens to do something that might turn out to be useful. Some drugs are used to treat different diseases than what they were originally developed for because we noticed that patients with those other diseases mysteriously showed improvements. I can't think of which off the top of my head but perhaps a heart medicine that stopped baldness.

The key difference is western medicine is tested objectively, while traditional medicines are based on belief. A million people getting sick and taking a treatment and recovering doesn't mean the treatment does any good, but they'll believe it does because everyone else believes it too.

[good_vibes]

You're just arguing to argue. I didn't see any cognitive dissonance created in his comment.

[gatlinnewhouse]

It should be noted as well that the concept of the "Eastern" is also Western in origin.

A good read about this is Orientalism by Edward Said.

[good_vibes]

Exactly. I believe it is possible to synthesize the logic of the West and the intuition of the East.