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Traditional Chinese Medicine is, of course, an entirely bogus modern phenomenon; a pseudoscience promoted by Chairman Mao that possesses no valid mechanism of action or evidence for its treatments. It's no more effective than the equally dubious remedies offered within European witchcraft.
Not that this stops millions of believers around the world using obscure herbal remedies, ingesting ground up animal parts - such as tiger bone and rhino horn - or having pins stuck in them in order to release a flow of vital energy along the body's meridians. Attempts to locate these mysterious pathways, or to identify this potency known as qi, have so far proved fruitless. Primarily, this is because they don't exist.
Practitioners of alternative medicine, however, don't allow such minor details or anatomical facts to stop them peddling their services and products. If modern knowledge of human physiology and pathology proves problematic to their teachings, they simply start talking about cosmic notions of yin and yang, patterns of harmony and disharmony, or the five phases. Such traditional Chinese wisdom is also, of course, entirely false - if pleasing to metaphysicians everywhere.
Happily, at least some Chinese philosophers are prepared to admit as much. In 2006, for example, Zhang Gongyao published an article entitled 'Farewell to Traditional Chinese Medicine', arguing that TCM in both theory and practice was absurd and should be exposed as such. The Chinese government, however, keenly aware of global export revenues, insisted that it had an important role to play in healthcare and deserved future development.
And this brings us back to Chairman Mao, who, almost single-handedly invented TCM as we know it today. Let me elaborate by summarizing a recent article by Alan Levinovitz, who is an assistant professor of Chinese Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University ...
Initially, following their victory in the Civil War, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party ridiculed TCM as irrational and backward; something contrary to the Party's programme of modernization and scientific progress. However, when it became clear that they would never be able to afford to establish a national healthcare programme reliant upon highly skilled doctors, expensive drugs, and advanced surgical techniques, Mao revised this position. Now TCM was proudly held up as a great national resource to be developed in opposition to the bourgeois medicine of capitalist imperialism.
Further, Mao realised that if only the traditional methods could be marketed in the right manner, they could be sold to gullible foreigners. And so the Chinese Communist party set about standardizing TCM into a single theoretical and practical system that could be taught as an alternative (holistic) science concerned with preventative and complimentary healthcare.
Next, they set about providing Westerners with sensational - but faked - evidence of what TCM could do. Eager to subscribe to the myth of the ancient wisdom of the east, this was, outrageously, accepted at face value by large numbers of the public, as well as many professionals who really should have known better. Before long a craze for TCM - particularly acupuncture - boomed and today you can get all kinds of quack treatments on the NHS!
Levinovitz nicely puts this into a cultural and historical context:
"The reason so many people take Chinese medicine seriously, at least in part, is that it was reinvented by one of the most powerful propaganda machines of all time and then consciously marketed to a West disillusioned by its own spiritual traditions. The timing couldn't have been better. Postmodernism was sweeping the academy, its valuable insights quickly degrading into naïve relativism. Thomas Kuhn had just published his theory of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions ... Alan Watts was introducing hippies to mind-blowing Eastern philosophy; Joseph Campbell was preaching the power of myth. Sick of Christianity and guilty about past imperialist sins, the West was ready to be healed by Mao's sanitized version of Chinese medicine."
He concludes:
"Ultimately, however, the existence of qi, acupuncture meridians, and the Triple Energizer is no more inherently plausible than that of demons, the four humours, or the healing power of God. It's just that Mao swindled us ..."
"Ultimately, however, the existence of qi, acupuncture meridians, and the Triple Energizer is no more inherently plausible than that of demons, the four humours, or the healing power of God. It's just that Mao swindled us ..."
Notes:
Alan Levinovitz's article in the online magazine Slate entitled 'Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine', can be found by clicking here.
My thanks to Zena McKeown for inspiring this post following a recent conversation on the topic.
