[Aurornis]

> Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations.

Most people don’t care where, when, or why a concept was invented as long as it works.

Quibbling over who discovered it first or trying to drag the conversation back to who discovered it first is like the person who tries to claim credit for being into a band before they were popular: Nobody cares, they just want to enjoy it.

> The older I get the more determined I find myself trying to glean the accrued wisdom of people who came before us...

Going back to the actual article: There is a big illusion of accrued wisdom of the ancients in TCM that isn’t backed up by the research. There are occasional hits where a TCM preparation intersects with a truly active compound, but it should be raising red flags when TCM practitioners claim to have cures for everything and different TCM practitioners will come up with different answers for the same patient. When the first one doesn’t work they’ll have another answer the next visit, and the next visit, and so on.

[IAmBroom]

An odd criticism. Would it be better if, when the treatment didn't work, they just prescribed the same thing?

I mean, most of TCM is pure bunkum, but blaming them for continuing to try to fix the problem is odd.

[Brian_K_White]

The criticism is that they claimed to have the solution the first time, instead of only claiming that they will try something functionally random.

A methodical process and a random or intuitive process only look like the same trial and error on the outside, and only to the (probably willfully) ignorant.

The trappings and ceremony of a theory and methodology are not actually a theory or methodology.

It doesn't do anyone any good to allow any confusion of the two.

[djtango]

Trial and error is not reproducible. Lack of a unifying theory also precludes reproducibility. We know better than that and should push other methods to these kinds of standards.

But TCM practitioners of the past and present have "landed" on successful treatment that go beyond just placebo and throwing that out because of the differing methods used in discovery and delivery is a shame when the more opportunistic thing to do would be to isolate and identify why the thing works.

Better yet, understanding why TCM continues to persist for reasons beyond just "culture" and trying to apply them back into our own prevailing methodologies would surely lead to better outcomes