[rtpg]

I'm not particularly bought into the traditional chinese medicine stuff but isn't the line more drawn at how "normal" medicine is about synthesizing specific doses of chemicals to give those?

Meanwhile if someone told me "yeah eating a bunch of ginger when you have a cold is good to you because ginger has a bunch of stuff that's good for your body then" I don't have a particularly hard time believing it. Sure! Why not!

The article's critique about symptom management rather than disease management is legit though. And the precision for actual research is good. But at the end of the day if my body needs some stuff for symptom management and some TCM strategy involves me giving myself like 20x the dose of it... well it's something, isn't it? Though you could argue about it "deserving" credit or not.

Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.

[sorcerer-mar]

No... Normal medicine is whatever we know works. It is unfathomably hard to figure out whether something works, ergo it is very specific knowledge (specific isolated compounds in specific amounts).

> well it's something, isn't it?

It's probably not!

If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.

[rtpg]

Fair enough, I can agree with the idea that you draw the line at "knowledge, gotten in the 'correct' way" as the categorization strategy.

In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.

[sorcerer-mar]

No no, my point is that it's unbelievably hard to know things. The reason we do unfathomably expensive clinical trials is because that's what's required to isolate signal from noise in a biological system. The reason they fail so frequently is because we're wrong most of the time we try it.

It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false.

It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.

[arp242]

> Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.

Sure, but that doesn't come with an entire theory about Chi energy lines, and no one claims this is "medicine" either (other than perhaps jokingly).

That's really the key thing. If you want to get a massage, or aromatherapy, or Reiki or whatever just because you like it, then that's fine. I'm happy for you! Massages even have proven benefits. Some may have benefits that are not yet proven. If you start claiming it will cure your cancer however...

This is also why I don't buy "detox" drinks that some restaurants have, even though some of them seem quite nice. The "detox" is just bollocks. I once even saw "detox" coriander leaves in the store. I like coriander. Maybe it's even good for you (I don't know). But "detox" coriander? Just, ugh...