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enderwillsaveyou t1_j1sgf4s wrote

Reply to comment by AppleWithGravy in Beijing to distribute Pfizer antiviral drug as Covid wave strains health system by web_explorer

How is an established history of treatment a placebo? People have been treated using this method successfully for thousands of years. Are all those patients and doctors in on it too?

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Foreign-Complaint130 t1_j1snfk4 wrote

"Successfully"

The same way my ancestors "successfully" prayed to St Brigid to protect them from the plague

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Genericnameandnumber t1_j1sna7w wrote

Seems like some folks are very honed in on the fact it’s called “Traditional Chinese” Medicine instead of it being simply named medicine. Word games? Kinda pointless to discuss about it in this case.

On the other hand, isn’t a lot of our medicine derived from ancient sources (herbs and all) - so… I’m sure there’s some element of viability to TCMs. Perhaps not against COVID, as it’s too novel? I don’t know. Would need to do some actual research and reading up to find out more instead of blindly believing the crowd and current sentiment.

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Larnak1 t1_j1t0qjo wrote

The reason why it's called "Traditional Chinese" is because most of it is not working. Otherwise, it would simply be medicine. But it's not for a reason.

And yes, of course, various modern medical knowledge is based on ancient research. But those things are part of "normal" medicine because they work. You don't need to look for "Traditional Chinese" to get those.

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Genericnameandnumber t1_j1t9t99 wrote

> The reason why it’s called “Traditional Chinese” is because most of it is not working. Otherwise, it would simply be medicine. But it’s not for a reason.

What do you even mean by this? You are simply playing with semantics.

Traditional medicine has been used and is still being used across the world in regions where modern medicine is not as accessible. To say it’s completely quack is just discounting billions of people as fools. What makes you think traditional medicine do not work at all?

If you want to argue with definitions:

> medicine, the practice concerned with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.

Some articles:

Here’s more: https://scholar.google.com.my/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=+traditional+medicine+effectiveness&btnG=

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Larnak1 t1_j1te0au wrote

I'm not playing with semantics. "traditional Chinese medicine" is used to refer to a certain set of approaches, and many of those are not working. If they were working, there was no need to refer to them in a specific way as they would have been included into modern medicine. That's not only true for Chinese traditional medicine - you see similar issues all around the world. People are good to see patterns, and tend to see patterns where none exist. Scientific standards are required to overcome that, and traditional communities did not have access to those.

That does obviously not mean that all old traditions are not working. But again: those that are get simply included into our general medical knowledge and become or already are medicine by modern standards.

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