Researchers push to back traditional Chinese medicine
with more data
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.
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.
To reach these goals, the overall
quality of research on traditional Chinese medicine must improve. With studies
of Chinese herbal remedies, for instance, rarely are scientists expected to
provide authentication of herbs they’re studying, which makes it difficult to
know what’s really in the concoctions. This hurdle also makes it harder for
other scientists to replicate the findings, says Qihe Xu, a professor in renal
medicine at King’s College London. Dr. Xu served as the coordinator of a recent
200-scientist consortium to study good practices for studying traditional
Chinese medicine, dubbed GP-TCM.
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