Traditional Chinese Medicine Gets Traction Among
Scientists
Traditional Chinese medicine teaches
that some people have hot constitutions, making them prone to fever and
inflammation in parts of the body, while others tend to have cold body parts
and get chills. Such Eastern-rooted ideas have been developed over thousands of
years of experience with patients. But they aren’t backed up by much scientific
data. As the WSJ’s Shirley S. Wang reports:
Now researchers in some the most
highly respected universities in China, and increasingly in Europe and the
U.S., are wedding Western techniques for analyzing complex biological systems
to the Chinese notion of seeing the body as a networked whole. The idea is to
study how genes or proteins interact throughout the body as a disease develops,
rather than to examine single genes or molecules.
“Traditional Chinese medicine views
disease as complete a pattern as possible,” says Jennifer Wan, a professor in
the school of biological sciences at the University of Hong Kong who studies
traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM. “Western medicine tends to view events or
individuals as discrete particles.” But one gene or biological marker alone
typically doesn’t yield comprehensive understanding of disease, she says.
…
In cities throughout China, doctors
practicing Western and Chinese medicine can both be found. Many patients go to
Western doctors for certain situations, such as acute illness, but seek out TCM
guidance in others, often to prevent disease.
TCM was largely ignored by Western
medicine until recent years, but is slowly gaining traction among some
scientists and clinicians. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio recently opened a
herbal therapy center. The U.S. government established the National Center for
Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 1998. The organization now has a
budget of over $120 million to fund research on the efficacy and safety of
alternative medicines, including those rooted in traditional Chinese medicine.
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