this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Can you show me scientific / published papers that show empirically that these things don't have any medicinal effect?
If so, then cool yes you're correct. If not then it hasn't been studied yet, and so you don't actually know.
"Traditional medicine doesn't work and if it does it would just be called medicine" is a quite stealthy form of racism that I'm honestly quite surprised to see here.
That's... not... how... anything works. You need to provide evidence that it does, the people who believe a thing is efficacious need to prove that it works. Which some of them have done, and that's why it's medicine, that's how Tu Youyou won her nobel prize. But there hasn't been proof of tiger bone or turtle plastron actually work. That's the problem.
But even ignoring your totally ridiculous inversion of how things work, we do actually test these things sometimes. Cochrane has 113 articles on traditional Chinese medicine.
Thank you, yes I am.
I am genuinely disappointed in this community now, having seen this thread. I think less of this place now.
Removed this bit because it was slightly rude to the racist
I'm not saying it does or doesn't work. I don't know. I am not Chinese. I don't have the cultural or historical context behind it. I don't read or speak Chinese. I'm not going to go tell anyone in China that it does or does not work because of all of the above.
I'm just once again asking people to slow their roll when applying a one size fits all approach to the entire breadth of human culture and knowledge. That's it. Apparently that's offensive to you somehow.
That's not even a non sequitur. That is less than that somehow. You genuinely need to step back and do better.
Whether tiger bones cure arthritis is an objective question with an objective answer and that answer is no.
No, you're right, that was slightly rude so I'll do what I should have started with and remove that and just report your racism and move on. Thanks for encouraging me to be better
What a snivelling shitty post. I should have blocked you long since, but it will have to be now.
literally every day on here people are doing the "thing - thing, china
" stuff; calling people racist for not going along is just another layer of ridiculousness
Incredible leaps you're making there. Literally all I'm saying is that a lot of modern medicine is rooted in older cultures going "this plant helps when we have this problem." I'm not saying traditional medicine is better than modern science or that you can juice cancer away. There is still an incredible amount we don't know about medicine and the body, and throwing away thousands of years of "we've always done X when Y" because "white western science hasn't studied that or doesn't understand it" is racist and stupid. This has nothing to do with China other than that the original post was about traditional Chinese medicine. I would say the same about literally any cultural medicinal traditions because it's true about any cultural medicinal traditions.
That's literally all I'm saying. It's super uncomplicated. If you'd like to dispute what I'm actually saying instead of what you're making up in your head about what I'm saying feel free.
Meanwhile yet again Hexbear comes out massively in defense of "racism but we pretend it's not."
the woo woo bit assuming china doesnt need to do "white western science" and instead just has to rely on hundreds of years of old wives tales that have about as much validity in them as the white european folk beliefs that snake oil drinks and incense were almost as good as actual medicine (despite china's superior medical institutions to most western countries) is even more ridiculous than the first comment, especially when you're following it up with the hand wavy 'there's just so much we don't understand, so who are we to say that healing crystals and skin scraping don't work?' that every hippy ive ever met has hit me with before either trying to get me on some drug or sell me something - also all the TCM stuff is by definition the stuff that's not adopted as modern medicine bcs its no different than a placebo if not worse.
really don't care to debate this further seeing how the whole thread's gone so far with you accusing the other guy of racism and then accusing everyone disagreeing of also being racist.
Again I am not saying the vast majority of the things you're saying I'm saying. Yet again I try to have a good faith argument on Hexbear and get absolutely dragged for a whole lot of shit I didn't say and am not saying. I genuinely don't understand the vitriol in this community sometimes.
That's not how medical research is done. If we claim that something is held to the same rigor as modern medicine, that's not it.
I suppose I didn't quite phrase it right. The point I'm trying to make is that the scientific process starts with "hmm that's interesting" or "hmm I wonder about." One way that a lot of modern medical science continues to grow is "hmm it's interesting that people have done this thing for thousands of years, I wonder why." Sometimes it leads to "wow, there's something to that" and sometimes it leads to "actually that's bogus" but throwing it all away just because it hasn't been studied yet is wrong and isn't how science works to begin with. I'm not saying that something definitely works simply because it hasn't been studied, but until something that people have anecdotally done for thousands of years is properly studied, we don't really know if there's something to it or not. There is a lot behind cultural apocryphal knowledge, societies don't typically don't do things a certain way "just because."
Hopefully this makes more sense.