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.
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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.
via Traditional Chinese Medicine Gets Traction Among Scientists – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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