Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

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Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby GrahamB on Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:51 am

This is going to go down like an outbreak of diarrhoea at a pool party with you guys, especially Michael, but spare a thought for Patricia Booth and her kidneys, or what's left of them, and don't believe everything alternative without question, just because it's full of Eastern wisdom, without applying a little bit of common sense to proceedings. Mystical amulets not withstanding, of course.

http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/how-d ... gulate-wu/
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby mrtoes on Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:08 am

Ah, Ben Goldacre on the warpath again :)

I'm well up for alternative treatments however I would like to see them all subjected to double-blind testing to determine what they can and can't do. Of course, the details of regulation are a more complicated and sensitive issue :-\

At the moment (horrific incidents such as this aside) there is a danger that Chinese medicine is getting lumped in with homoeopathy, and evidence of scientific rigour would greatly help the business of Chinese doctors - assuming that the treatments do what they say on the tin of course.

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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby GrahamB on Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:15 am

I agree. Whenever I have an argument about homeopathy with my 'new age' friends they start sending me double-blind tests of herbalism, proving it works. Why the fuck can't people distinguish between homeopathy and herbalism? I think it's because they both start with 'h', and in general people are pretty mentally lazy when it comes to anything involving "wooo wooo".
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Michael on Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:53 am

GrahamB wrote:This is going to go down like an outbreak of diarrhoea at a pool party with you guys, especially Michael,

I sort of figured that a thread on Chinese Medicine started by Graham would be of this sort. The article is completely predictable in its denigrating references to Oriental Medicine jargon. Once again, the blind are yelling at those with vision and insisting they poke out their own eyeballs. There's no reason OMD and other therapies shouldn't be regulated, but the article is misleading by whining about one instance of a doctor's mistake in the context of M.D. iatrogenic numbers, at least in the US, which are the second or third leading cause of death, numbering in the three to four hundred thousand per year over here (300,000 - 400,00), most of it due to non-banned pharmaceuticals. So therapies could be regulated and the evidence this has prevented problems in the long term is....what? But go ahead and regulate all of it. Anyway, pretty lame info from my P.O.V. Much bigger problems in the medical field than this and homeopathy.

Don't know specifically about the UK, but in the USA, it's pharmaceutical takeover of training and subsequent reliance on symptom masking pharma for never-ending treatment, systemic insurance fraud by the big carriers, and insurance premiums for doctors that are much bigger issues.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Darth Rock&Roll on Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:01 am

TCM and it's practice absolutely should be regulated and governed according to the country it is practiced in and by those medical standards set there.

Having said that, what the author of that article fails to point out is that there are more than 10,000 deaths a year from negligent practice in western medicine! :o

Point being, do not put your health into anyone else's hands without full understanding the issues yourself.
It's ok to tell your doctor "no, I would like a second opinion"

Drs are people too. They have shitty days, they make errors, they get mad at people, they like sex and chocolate and so on.
Don't elevate them beyond that and take responsibility for your health!
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Michael on Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:04 am

10K/year in Canadia? As I mentioned, it's between 300-400K/year in the USA.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby mrtoes on Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:35 am

Yeah the article isn't fair or balanced, and one bad accident shouldn't be singled out as indicative of the industry as a whole. I do think the question of what regulation should exist is an interesting one however.

Michael, I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts. Let us accept for the moment that neither western nor traditional medicine are superior to each other, and that both have their good and bad sides, do you think that traditional medicine should be validated in the same way as western medicine, through clinical trials using double blind testing?

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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Darth Rock&Roll on Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:15 am

Michael are you saying that there is supporting data that indicates that 300 thousand to 400 thousand deaths per year are occurring due to malpractice in the USA?

generally speaking the USA and Canada are the same with Canada reflecting 10% (it's size) of the numbers in the USA.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Michael on Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:45 am

Hi Matthew, it's not as simple as it may seem to be and the ability to claim Western Medicine has succeeded in double-blind tests is not much of a bragging right compared to its actual results. The whole situation has been turned on its head, but if it is possible to advance any skill, including Oriental Medicine or Western Medicine, through double blind testing then why not? So yes, as far as that goes, but I'll tell you why not is that the trouble with double blind testing isn't the therapy or medical system, but the number of variables.

People with deep knowledge understand that human health is a microcosm of the total environment/reality in which man lives, while people with pills to sell and student loans to pay wear blinders in a reductionist worldview. There are too many variables in the doctor, patient, and method for any easy answers, and yet physical human health can be kept optimum through simple nutrition and a bit of sunlight with prevention as the best answer for avoiding problems, and Chinese Medicine is vastly superior to Western when it comes to prevention because of its four-part, intuitive, diagnostic method that reveals disruptions in internal energy flow before they manifest into parenchymal diseases.

The essence of this thread is about detriments to human health and how to prevent them in the various medical systems by weeding out bad doctors and yet Western Medicine kills a huge number of people every year. How does this address the toxins in our food, water, and air? After that, there is no greater detriment to our health than the industrialized health care system based on pharmaceutical giants who do not care one whit for us, but have been married to the military-industrial complex through biological and chemical weapons testing for nearly a hundred years. And I'll just stop right there.

I find the research of Dr. Weston Price interesting that people's health was fantastically good around the world if they had adequate nutrition prior to the introduction of industrialized Western foodstuffs. Think Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Watch the early 20th century movie "Tabu" about some South Pacific Islanders to see how healthy we're supposed to be.

Sorry, Matthew, I wasn't able to keep it in scope. I tried. :) There are several OMD's on RSF who really know this stuff. Every system of knowledge, medical, martial, etc., that has withstood the test of time in a large population is worthwhile, including both Oriental and Occidental. I question the true origins and validity of our current big-pharma system because it claims superiority, delivers little, and condemns others, while falsely advertising that its virtue is based on science. If so, it is the type of science devoid of wisdom.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Michael on Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:46 am

Darth Rock&Roll wrote:Michael are you saying that there is supporting data that indicates that 300 thousand to 400 thousand deaths per year are occurring due to malpractice in the USA?

Yup.
Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Killing 225,000 People Every Year
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Darth Rock&Roll on Mon Feb 22, 2010 8:03 am

well... I'm not subscribing to yet one more webservice! lol

But I did manage to read the article despite the annoying request for me to subscribe laid over it. :)

I would add that the article you cited made reference to a number that was a lot lower than what you gave and it was attributed to the full scope of iatrogenic causes and not just physicians. Of which 100,000 were attributed to problems with hospital conditions and another 106,000 were drug related side effects.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Michael on Mon Feb 22, 2010 8:56 am

I love it when you nitpick ;D
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Doc Stier on Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:24 am

Any Oriental Medicine practitioner who actually completed a 3,000-5,000 hour course of education from an accredited college, and thereafter passed the required examinations, would certainly know what the chemical composition and medicinal actions are for any individual Chinese herb, any Chinese herbal formula, or any Chinese patent medicine sold in shops anywhere! Thus, if the practitioner in the article didn't know these things, their formal education was clearly deficient, which usually translates to mean self-taught from reading books and perhaps taking a few weekend workshops or such prior to commencing a professional clinic practice. ::)

While government regulation or licensing requirements and exams can usually weed out such individuals, and provide the general public with a greater sense of security and a greater expectation of competency in pursuing a course of treatment via Oriental Medicine, it can also have a down side as well.

In the USA, most States require completion of a 3,000-5,000 hour course of education and examinations from a Nationally Accredited College, followed by passing one or more required examinations for legal regulation or licensing. In virtually every State, however, this process is overseen and administrated by a State Board of Acupuncture Examiners under the general umbrella of the State Board of Medical Examiners, if not directly regulated by the Medical Board.

This scenario has most often resulted in ever increasing regulatory requirements and restrictions related to Oriental Medicine, which eventually either prevents or eliminates any reasonable likelihood of being able to secure or maintain the required license. When these measures fail to get rid of the pesky acupuncturists, further legislation is eventually passed into law which requires the Licensed Acupuncturist (L.AC.) to only receive new patients that are formally referred to them by a Licensed Physician (M.D.), which rarely happens.

This leaves those who are the least educated and the least competent in Oriental Medicine techniques, such as Medical Doctors (M.D), Chiropractors (D.C.), and in some places Clinical Psychologists, as the most accessible providers of acupuncture or other Oriental Medicine treatment services under the legal auspices of an unrelated professional license. Meanwhile, those who are the best educated and most competent to provide Oriental Medicine treatment services, the Licensed Acupuncturists (L.AC.), are consistently hamstrung with increased legal impediments and large numbers of less educated and less competent competitors.

In this way, the Licensed Acupuncturist's ability to generate a professional income from their Oriental Medicine practice is ultimately killed in many parts of the country, and they eventually disappear accordingly, as planned all along. This is apparently viewed by the mainstream medical community as the best way to eliminate real acupuncturists as Primary Health Care competitors! A sad state of affairs for both the professional Oriental Medicine practitioners and for their potential contributions to the health care of their local communities. :(
Last edited by Doc Stier on Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby Darth Rock&Roll on Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:40 am

Another thing about herbs.

Most drugs used in drug therapy use the active ingredient of herbs.

When people rail against regular pill form drugs, they are railing against the refinement of the very same herbs they are willing to take.

I've always found this a bit baffling.

I can take an aspirin in any number of dosages as recommended, or I can chew on some willow bark til my headache goes away and i have no idea what the dose was!

Alternately I can measure up a few grams of some other form of aspiry and make a draught.

fuck it. Bayers, 2 tabs please, done. :D
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Re: Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

Postby D_Glenn on Mon Feb 22, 2010 10:05 am

GrahamB wrote:I agree. Whenever I have an argument about homeopathy with my 'new age' friends they start sending me double-blind tests of herbalism, proving it works. Why the fuck can't people distinguish between homeopathy and herbalism? I think it's because they both start with 'h', and in general people are pretty mentally lazy when it comes to anything involving "wooo wooo".


If you have surgery in the U.S. they will recommend that you take homeopathic arnica montana, they don't officially endorse it or give a reasoning on why it works, they only simply know that it helps remove bruising and aids in recovery.

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