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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: Do you drool? TCM to the rescue!
On TV yesterday a professor of TCM said that the remedy to drooling is to stop kissing babies on the forehead.
When he said this the interviewer and the studio crowd all clapped wildly, as if they had been shown the light. (Probably a bunch of droolers.)
My response was to laugh out loud. After a moment, I reflected on how lucky I am to have a wife with a brain.
What's the stupidest peace of TCM advice you've ever heard of?
*Disclosure; I think TCM is placebo.
9 years 21 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Comparing TCM to voodoo and shamanism doesn't do justice to voodoo or shamanism. Even without scientific reasoning, primitive cultures can experiment and observe, frequently leading to the discovery of working remedies.
What Chinese Traditional Medicine does, is base the reasoning on face and gratification:
- Is the TCM expert a wizened old shifu? Then everything he says must be profound ancient secrets passed down from ages immemorial. Because old people in China are the most competent. Why? Because nobody dare question their competence.
- Is the alleged remedy linking two ridiculously unrelated things, like an activity that couldn't concievably affect the body in a way that it would cause/cure the ailment? Well, that just makes it more memorable. Simple things like eating skin being good for your skin - how could that be considered TCM knowledge? It works, but it's too easy and obvious. The public want more HIDDEN secrets!
- Does the cure involve some big/expensive sacrifice or preposterous restriction of personal freedom? If you lose a lot, then by the reasoning of Chinese Zero Sum Game logic, the cure must be effective to the same degree. Zen balance FTW!
- Is it an interesting/shocking gossip story? Then it has been effective (the tale, not the remedy) in spreading itself like wildfire across the country.
- When listening to the shifu's advice, did you feel his tall tales stroked your ego enough? Did you feel enlightened with uncommon sense? Then the gratification is the strongest placebo. Like with voodoo, you need to *believe* it will work, or it won't.
In conclusion, I believe that social effects in Chinese culture actually cause ONLY the useless or mildly detrimental remedies to be passed on and promoted, while simple, effective, working cures are written off as unprofitable. Medicine to Chinese is about gaining hidden elitist knowledge, so the TCM storytellers cater to that expectation. It's a health market, and you can only sell working remedies once to a patient, then he is cured. And he will remember the remedy for next time.
So, to keep a customer base, the cures are made expensive, rare, and ineffective (better yet: harmful), to keep patients on the come-back. Manufactured scarcity in health care - it's why the west has Hippocratic oaths for doctors.
On a sidenote, not everything in TCM is 100% worthless. Sometimes they do stumble upon an uncommon remedy, and then they guard the secret. I half remember a story from Thailand years ago, of a remedy being discovered for dysentery or cholera. A substance from the Silk Worm was effective in alleviating symptoms of the disease. The Thai scientists who discovered it organized a conference in Thailand, where they proudly revealed their discovery. Perhaps it was learned from TCM and copied? I don't know.
Anyway, the shocking part was the Chinese delegation, which came to the conference presenting research that allegedly disproved the effectiveness. Since it was very new research just being presented, everybody soon realized that the Chinese scientists couldn't possibly have had time to properly scrutinize the results that had just been made public. Falsification testing takes weeks, but they were quick to present their fake data, in the hopes of convincing people Silk Worm just doesn't work.
Why they did it remains unclear. Perhaps they felt Chinese Silk Worms are China's intellectual property, so they wanted the credit to go to Chinese scientists? Perhaps they knew about the cure, but didn't want non-Chinese lives to be saved? Whatever the motivation, it was pathetic, unscientific, bad form and typical Chinese.
The stupidest TCM reference I saw was a "special" type of cigerette that "removed" tar from your lungs. It was just a normal cigerette. I have also seen cigerettes that have ground tiger bone in them.
All TCM is stupid.
Scandinavian:
I would have written more, but my first attempt at posting was stopped by massive amounts of drool on my desk.
icnif77:
You should get water-pfoof puter.
Army use them all the time at the snorkeling spoof attacks. Deep-underwater-cover.
royceH:
Sure, but the Q is asking about the stupidest.
Anyway, how about you give up the forehead kissing! Sicko.
My wife is always asking me about my opinion on different Chinese customs and remedies. I have to hand it to her. Though she was raised in a small village, she is making a concerted effort to bring herself out of ignorance. This, to me, is the wonder of living in China. There are not many places on earth (perhaps nowhere) where you will see such a large society that's so mired in backwards, outmoded thinking, yet exist in the midst of modern contemporaries. It's like traveling in a time machine because long ago, the whole world was like this.
The real national treasure of China isn't its ancient buildings or its depleted culture, but the dichotomy of it's society. China has been the "boy in the plastic bubble" who finally gets out and becomes the weirdest kid in high school. Instead of always ridiculing him, I find him quite interesting. Our people were once like this. It brings out the historian or anthropologist in me. Sometimes, I get excited wondering whats going to happen next with these people. So yeah, TCM, in its current form is stupid. But let's not forget we used to think this way. Don't blame the bubble boy. It's not his fault. Try to enjoy the museum that is China.
royceH:
And Sir, how right you are!
Thank you for this food for thought. Now, if only I had someone to share it with...
Comparing TCM to voodoo and shamanism doesn't do justice to voodoo or shamanism. Even without scientific reasoning, primitive cultures can experiment and observe, frequently leading to the discovery of working remedies.
What Chinese Traditional Medicine does, is base the reasoning on face and gratification:
- Is the TCM expert a wizened old shifu? Then everything he says must be profound ancient secrets passed down from ages immemorial. Because old people in China are the most competent. Why? Because nobody dare question their competence.
- Is the alleged remedy linking two ridiculously unrelated things, like an activity that couldn't concievably affect the body in a way that it would cause/cure the ailment? Well, that just makes it more memorable. Simple things like eating skin being good for your skin - how could that be considered TCM knowledge? It works, but it's too easy and obvious. The public want more HIDDEN secrets!
- Does the cure involve some big/expensive sacrifice or preposterous restriction of personal freedom? If you lose a lot, then by the reasoning of Chinese Zero Sum Game logic, the cure must be effective to the same degree. Zen balance FTW!
- Is it an interesting/shocking gossip story? Then it has been effective (the tale, not the remedy) in spreading itself like wildfire across the country.
- When listening to the shifu's advice, did you feel his tall tales stroked your ego enough? Did you feel enlightened with uncommon sense? Then the gratification is the strongest placebo. Like with voodoo, you need to *believe* it will work, or it won't.
In conclusion, I believe that social effects in Chinese culture actually cause ONLY the useless or mildly detrimental remedies to be passed on and promoted, while simple, effective, working cures are written off as unprofitable. Medicine to Chinese is about gaining hidden elitist knowledge, so the TCM storytellers cater to that expectation. It's a health market, and you can only sell working remedies once to a patient, then he is cured. And he will remember the remedy for next time.
So, to keep a customer base, the cures are made expensive, rare, and ineffective (better yet: harmful), to keep patients on the come-back. Manufactured scarcity in health care - it's why the west has Hippocratic oaths for doctors.
On a sidenote, not everything in TCM is 100% worthless. Sometimes they do stumble upon an uncommon remedy, and then they guard the secret. I half remember a story from Thailand years ago, of a remedy being discovered for dysentery or cholera. A substance from the Silk Worm was effective in alleviating symptoms of the disease. The Thai scientists who discovered it organized a conference in Thailand, where they proudly revealed their discovery. Perhaps it was learned from TCM and copied? I don't know.
Anyway, the shocking part was the Chinese delegation, which came to the conference presenting research that allegedly disproved the effectiveness. Since it was very new research just being presented, everybody soon realized that the Chinese scientists couldn't possibly have had time to properly scrutinize the results that had just been made public. Falsification testing takes weeks, but they were quick to present their fake data, in the hopes of convincing people Silk Worm just doesn't work.
Why they did it remains unclear. Perhaps they felt Chinese Silk Worms are China's intellectual property, so they wanted the credit to go to Chinese scientists? Perhaps they knew about the cure, but didn't want non-Chinese lives to be saved? Whatever the motivation, it was pathetic, unscientific, bad form and typical Chinese.
I'm waiting for Gouxiong to come and defend this.......
xinyuren:
I think he's consulting his superiors at the moment. They will run this thread thru their new supercomputer. Just be patient. He is waiting for the results.