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TCM is studied scientifically there and anything with proven medical effects is often prescribed alongside typical western medications as it tends to be much cheaper in China. Theyre usually encouraged to try both to see how it goes. Sometimes the TCM is about counteracting the side effects of one drug or another to make it less of a pain to take.
(I have a chinese trans friend that was prescribed some sort of TCM anti-androgen once alongside a typical anti-androgen, I believe it was cypro? )
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2023.1038039/full
The TCM in question was related to Cacumen Platycladi, it apparently acts similarly to finasteride but is possible to grow yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platycladus
anything with proven medical effects is often prescribed alongside typical western medications as it tends to be much cheaper in China.
IME, TCM 中药 (regardless of any proven medical effects or not) are usually prescribed alongside 'western' medicine 西药, but the TCM is often 5-10x more expensive than the 'western' medicine. and by western medicine here i mean generic drugs usually produced domestically (imported western brand name drugs are of course more expensive). paracetamol, antibiotics and other stuff is usually a lot cheaper than TCM. the cost of a clinic visit for a flu or cold is usually like 30% doctor's fee, 10% generic meds, 60% some flower extract (or worse, bear bile)
Maybe in the west my understanding in china you can buy it in bulk for pretty cheap, she said she could buy this in kilos cause it's made from nettles on a tree. Idk about the research on other TCM I'm mostly talking about this specific one that has alleged anti androgenic properties.
hey, both of us joined the same day six years ago? 🎂🎂
if you're talking about one specific herb, then sure, there's lots of stuff you can buy cheaply, and lost of stuff that is expensive.
most TCM that is prescribed to people at regular clinics, as well as TCM that you can get at pharmacies, are still things like pills and powders and syrups, not raw ingredients. at least in my experience from a dozen or so doctors visits and many more pharmacy visits, in several cities.
there are also clinics that specialize in TCM, and TCM drug stores (I'm not calling them pharmacies but i'm not sure what the best word to translate to is) and these places will have the whole ingredient type TCM (including whole dried seahorses) that they measure and grind to a powder for you. they're also generally expensive for what you get.
Like all the best things in life, it’s a grey area. TCM is researched and studied in medical universities, including things like acupuncture and its efficacy, while traditional home remedies remain widespread (though remedy isn’t really the right word, as the idea is often prevention rather than cure), such as drinking warm or hot water and eating certain foods to strengthen parts of the body (like eating pork trotters to strengthen your arms).
At the same time, TCM is still strictly regulated, with licensing required to practise and open clinics, and promoting it over proven modern medicine is a big no. This was one of the reasons for the crackdown on Falun Gong, as they pushed members to forgo modern treatment in favour of “energy breathing” and spiritual exercises.
What have they learned about acupuncture? My layperson's understanding is it belongs in the same category as chiropractic adjustment i.e. it seems like there might be something useful surrounded by and entangled with a bunch of superstition.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1744388126000186
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40971519/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/NDT.S541627
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2095496425001621
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12113930/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40938602/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13018-024-05118-8?fromPaywallRec=false
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13643-025-02977-y?fromPaywallRec=true
It’s quackery and the CPC should take harsher measures against it.
Look at Korean Traditional Medicine and the Korean health industry to see where entertaining this antisocial behavior leads. (note I said health industry, not healthcare industry. Gongjindan will cure all your diseases.) people get doctorates in this bullshit and are considered extremely wise and productive members of society. They’re called “doctor” and run practices for fucks sake.
We already have a term for studying the effects of plant based compounds and developing medicines and treatments from them
It’s called science.
TCM is a science in China, though. It is put through the same clinical trials as laboratory pharmaceuticals. It is researched with the same scientific method. China just isn't dismissive of generations of anecdotal evidence and the eradication of Indigenous medicinal knowledge like colonial medicine is.
Anecdotal evidence, I may add, is not a negative thing for doctors to consider. For instance, there is very little actual clinical research on trans hormone therapies. Especially with regards to secondary or tertiary treatments, like progesterone. Anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of progesterone in breast development is the primary reason affirming doctors are willing to prescribe it, despite the lack of clinical evidence.
The answer isn't to denigrate treatments and medications that haven't been thoroughly studied, but to increase the amount of study.
TCM is a science in China, though. It is put through the same clinical trials as laboratory pharmaceuticals. It is researched with the same scientific method. China just isn't dismissive of generations of anecdotal evidence and the eradication of Indigenous medicinal knowledge like colonial medicine is.
This is bullshit. I'm sorry this is some noble savage bullshit. Tu Youyou won her nobel prize, that ks the grain of truth in this. But there is no scientific basis for prescribing tiger bones, turtle plastron and hornets nest for anything. These did not and do not go through the same testing as actual medicinr, and we know that because if they did we would have scientific evidence for their efficaciousness.
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.
yes you're correct
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.
The first (and only) step in the scientific process is "published paper." There's actually no other steps. No observations, no hypothesis, nothing. Science actually just magically happens.
That's not even a non sequitur. That is less than that somehow. You genuinely need to step back and do better.
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.
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.
it's actually racist to not believe King Charles III and his court alchemist's ancestral knowledge dating back to druidic times of acupuncture, herbal tinctures, coffee enemas, fruit juice and potions of greater healing is better at treating prostate cancer than chemotherapy
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.
Sure! Same’s true of governments. We have a thing called ‘democracy’ which ensures that governments listen to the people and perform only actions that are in service to them. Any policy of ‘government’ is therefore a product of what’s best for the populace they serve, and people suggesting other policies are just quacks.
Wait…what’s that you say… democracy is broken and doesn’t function like that because of the corrupt power exerted over it by those who own the means of production…
Well, there you go then. Unless you’ve got a very good reason why ‘Science’ is immune from those exact same forces we’ve no more reason to trust its output than we have the policies of government.
Officially, TCM is studied and practised alongside Western medicine (though many doctors trained in Western medicine look down on TCM). There are integrated TCM hospitals that are pretty cool. The idea is that Western medicine treats specific symptoms, but not whole patients (this is very true). So in these integrated hospitals, there will be Western treatment of specific illnesses, with TCM prescribed as therapies to help manage wellness in general and mitigate side-effects.
So for example: a TCM hospital that has an oncology ward will give a patient chemotherapy, however they will also prescribe certain TCM treatments (herbal decoctions, dietary prescriptions, etc) as supplementary treatments to manage the nausea and physical toll of chemotherapy.
The idea is that Western medicine treats specific symptoms, but not whole patients (this is very true)
taking the literal same line as western quacks but Chinese so its communist now.
This is embarassing for China to allow and it is embarassing for you to go along with it.
I think it's embarrassing for you to be a racist asshole about things you don't know about and to act superior like a chauvinist fuckwit about people who have ideas that disagree with you, but here we are. Miss me with your aggressive disrespect bro
You are literally verbatim quoting the "holistic medicine"/"functional medicine"/"natural medicine" line, and it isn't racist to point that out.
Like you are literally repeating the fucking sales pitch for health grifters.
Grow up.
You're hyped-up aggressive insults of everyone that disagrees with you and your inability to recognize that people are explaining a different worldview than yours and that isn't inherently evil or ignorant or deserving of scorn is what's racist.
You're refusing to actually read the content of the messages you're replying to and making up a person to argue with in your own head.
It is a fucking fact from my lived experience that doctors in the West treat one thing. You go to an office and you are allowed to bring up one problem. Bodies don't fucking work like that. How can you know which things are connected? How could the doctor actually diagnose what's wrong and provide a real, lasting treatment if they are only getting disconnected, disjointed snapshots of issues you face. If you tell a doctor you have a weird fucking pain in your shoulder but you can't also tell them about the sores on your shins because that's two things then no fucking wonder it takes ten years to get a fucking MS diagnosis.
Holistic is not a dirty word, whatever chuddy ass, chauvinistic, superiority-driven complex you have makes you declare that with utmost confidence that everyone who disagrees is inferior to your clearly brilliant intellect. Learn to engage with what people actually are saying, and learn to come into conversations respectfully even when you disagree, or fucking leave me alone forever, because your arrogance disgusts me.
Trying to tone police at this point when you have thrown repeated childish insults my way isn't useful, and I'm not gonna respect t. Fuck off and grow up.
You're refusing to actually read the content of the messages you're replying to and making up a person to argue with in your own head.
I said you were quoting the sales pitch of "holistics medicine" and general medical quackery, citing the instance of you doing so. That is a thing that happened, we can both see it. I am not making anything up, I called out directly the thing you did citing where you did it. In response to which you called me a racist fuckwit.
This is hypocrisy of course, but it's also uust deeply embarassing. Especially when you then go on to make a continued direct screed that is also just repeating the "holistic medicine" sales pitch.
Holistic is not a dirty word,
Yes it is. It's a scam. People die or have their money taken from them. At best its placebo, at worst people die. Healthcare scams are wrong.
"tone police" go fuck off, you came in this thread insulting everyone around.
you're out here making up arguments as if I said every treatment under the sun works, when what I said is they are being studied and that they should be studied more. learn to read. And the word holistic itself is not a dirty word just because some people use it while they do scams, that's patently ridiculous. Holistic is a process of looking at entire systems as a whole. Dialectics is a holistic approach to understanding things too. Please familiarize yourself with what you're even angry at.
Okay no you don't actually get to do the whole "educate yourself' routine when you are wrong about the basic definition of words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine#Other_terms
Holistic medicine is another rebranding of alternative medicine. In this case, the words balance and holism are often used alongside complementary or integrative, claiming to take into fuller account the "whole" person, in contrast to the supposed reductionism of medicine
You especially don't get to to do the whole "You don't even know what you're mad at" line when you are either lying in support of quackery or mistaken about the very meaning of words.
You also don't get to try to claim dialectics for your bullshit.
Go back. Do better.
taking the same line as mainstream libs, that there are no fundamental flaws in how western medical research is done
as cringe as TCM may be, this is cringier
No. That isn't what I said, that's not a reasonable interpretation of it, and even if it were your conclusion would still be bogus.
Go to posting jail, do not collect 200 for passing start, reflect on how ridiculous this post was.
It is encouraged along with western medicine but there are regulations particularly on endangered animals being used like bear bile and rino horns and such
As I understand it, there’s a big difference between a westerner appropriating TCM to sell some snake oil and a licensed TCM practitioner in China who has studied the empirical aspects of it for years. And that difference scales up to how our cultures relate to “alternative” medicine. Chinese empiricism in this regard also has less of a focus on the need to explain the mechanism behind everything and is more content to use things which are known to work despite not knowing why. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from listening to TCM practitioners explaining their practice to foreigners like myself on xiaohongshu
And if you listen to a functional medicine "practitioner" i'm sure they would also say they know what they're doing, but they would still be quacks
This is literally the same lines too.
Artemisinin is an effective and WHO-recommended antimalaria drug derived from TCM because of Chinese government research
There are definitely laws against "superstition" that prevent some practices that you could call folk medicine, but idk if those are grouped under TCM proper to begin with. As the others said, TCM generally is studied and encouraged by the CPC, and has been in various forms since Mao.
A second not fun fact about the Falun Gong is that they were at one point sanctioned and supported by the CPC under the auspices of a broader program by the state to encourage the practice of and research into qigong.
I looked on Wikipedia to get the timeline straight and it's kind of amazing how every single grievance by the FG is listed (including CPC "brainwashing* classes") but the self-immolation incident only gets 5 sentences.
*I know the literal term comes from Mao and might literally be what they were called, but the term means something very different in English.
From what I can gather, it seems like the party made an effort to professionalize it because 1) there were deleterious social aspects to it (poaching, illegal markets) that could be controlled by licensing and 2) it preserves an element of traditional culture while also attempting to glean benefit from it 3) introducing scientific review may eventually merge it with allopathic medicine the way osteopathic medicine has essentially become the same in regions of the US edit: 4) by professionalizing it and having TCM doctors constantly refer to it as adjunctive, more traditional folks who are skeptical of modern medicine will be more open to medical treatment and TCM practitioners will be professionally liable against telling their patients to avoid scientific medical treatments in lieu of TCM
I don't know anything about it other than that they are researching TCM remedies scientifically. And the only reason I remember this is because of the meme that the woman who won a nobel prize for it, Tu Youyou, would be difficult to sing "Happy Birthday" for.
Very impressive woman though, she should be know for far more than just the meme.
Hm.
"happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday dear Youyou, happy birthday to you!"
I don't see it tbqh.
It was just a silly twitter comment, not meant seriously, I thought it was funny and it made me look at her wikipedia page and got very impressed so I remembered her. Like look at this:
Tu is regarded as the "Three-Without Scientist" – no postgraduate degree (there was no postgraduate education then in China), no study or research experience abroad, and not a member of either of the Chinese national academies, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Tu is now regarded as a representative figure of the first generation of Chinese doctors since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Very impressive woman
She sounds badass as hell and my reply was also not meant particularly seriously<3
I was an obsessive martial artist before Covid, and the most complete, demystifying qigong book I ever read was Knocking at the Gate of Life (1985), and the cover says "official manual of the People's Republic of China".
I have no idea about the current state of things.