Traditional Chinese Medicine = a commercially driven world in an evidence-free environment of make-belief | Edzard Ernst

Chinese proprietary herbal medicines (CPHMs) are a well-established and a hugely profitable part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with a long history in China and elsewhere; they are used for all sorts of conditions, not least for the treatment of common cold. Many CPHMs have been listed in the ‘China national essential drug list’ (CNEDL), the official reference published by the Chinese Ministry of Health. One would hope that such a document to be based on reliable evidence – but is it?

The aim of a recent review was to provide an assessment on the potential benefits and harms of CPHMs for common cold listed in the CNEDL...

Read on: Traditional Chinese Medicine = a commercially driven world in an evidence-free environment of make-belief

Chinese medicine should not be available on the NHS | New Humanist

Thousands of studies have shown acupuncture to be little more than a placebo, and herbal remedies have been barely tested. There is no case for public funding, argues David Colquhoun

In April this year, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested that Traditional Chinese Medicine could be made available through the NHS, provided there was "good evidence" that it works.

At one level, the answer to this is simple. When TCM has been tested, it doesn’t work. There’s nothing unusual about that. Almost all of Western medicine from 100 years ago was equally ineffective.

TCM isn’t really traditional. In 1822 Emperor Dao Guang banned acupuncture and moxibustion from the Imperial Medical Academy. As practised now in the West, it’s essentially a product of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 (Atwood, 2009), though Chairman Mao didn’t use it himself. It started as a device to encourage Chinese nationalism, and now it is a mixture of nationalism and big business...


Read the full post here: Chinese medicine should not be available on the NHS | New Humanist