[paraditedc]

The fact that nobody in the West bothered doing in-depth research into TCM does not mean it's ineffective or bad.

Chinese people have been practicing it for thousands years and we are doing just fine in terms of life expectancy, actually better than US.

[EmbarrassedFuel]

Do you have anything better than an appeal to tradition to justify your viewpoint, perhaps a book or study that comprehensively justifies TCM without falling into the basic traps of failed statistical reasoning?

[paraditedc]

Perhaps the missing point is that the TCM approach to illness or health is dramatically different from Western medicine.

Surgery or modern medicine (injection, pills) focuses on one particular manifestation of illness and targets a particular illness.

On the other hand, TCM is not targeting a particular illness, but rather, it sees illness as the symptom of something deeper going off track in the body. Hence it tries to regulate and balance the body so that it can correct itself, without too much intervention.

It's not something that you can quantitatively study easily and get concrete results, as it is more long-term and therapeutic rather than short-term result driven.