Chinese Medicine

Some of the people I know are interested in Chinese medicine. They thrive on alternative medicine practices, and traditional Chinese medicine—with its thousands of years of history—holds a great attraction. The belief, I think, begins with the idea that anything herbal has to be more “natural” and hence better for you. The fact that many herbs are poisonous or even deadly is edited out of this picture up front.

 I spend a lot of time in China, and I happen to know that the average Chinese person would definitely rather have Western medicine than Chinese medicine. They consider it more effective.  They commonly express concern that because traditional Chinese medicine isn't that effective, the Chinese medicine industry illegally spikes many different herbal concoctions with antibiotics and other Western medicines, so that they will work better. My Chinese friends claim that it's a shooting gallery taking the stuff; in many cases you don't know exactly what you're getting. I've actually even been warned by some of them not to use it. "Better go see a regular western-style doctor," they say to me when I need medical care in Shanghai, gently amused by American interest in what they consider to be outdated folk practices.

Furthermore, as you can see from the picture above (taken in a major Shanghai hospital in the herbal department) Chinese medicine is a mass-market business. The herbs are not gathered by stooped-over little old men and women in pastoral environments; they are grown in huge amounts  on large commercial farms, and shipped to hospitals just like any other factory-farmed product.

It's very possible, knowing China, that pesticides are used on these herbs while they are being grown. The country has been wracked by one contaminated-food scandal after another over the last 2 years, and pesticide use is definitely under less control than in Western agriculture... which ought to frighten just about everyone.

No one tells Americans who take Chinese medicine about that.

 That's not to knock Chinese medicine. For people who want to take it, it seems fine to me, presuming you're okay with the risks. Furthermore, some of my very best friends are adept practitioners of alternative medicine, and I fully support them. We have room for both practices, I think, and the emotive value alone of such therapies is not to be dismissed, under any circumstances.

 What interests me about all of this is that to many Americans, the other's tradition often seems better than our own; yet we rarely pause to think that it might work the other way around as well.

To the Chinese, Western science is not just a tradition; it's a cultural practice they would like to adopt, and are doing so to great effect. Chinese people are eager to educate themselves and avail themselves of modern technology.  They are producing some of the most advanced science—including medical science—in the world. They don't have inhibitions about it produced by religious fundamentalists, as a significant portion of America does. This is one of the reasons Asian cultures represent the future of scientific and medical innovation. They believe in evolution—and in science.

  In the meantime, westerners enthusiastically embrace their medical folk traditions, all of which date from an era where the average lifespan was— objectively—less than half of what it is today.   No one has been able to explain to me why modern Western medicine, which is what achieved the doubling of the human lifespan, gets a bad reputation in some alternative communities, any more than they have been able to explain why all the food we are eating is so terrible, while we live twice as long as people did several hundred years ago, when everything was indisputably organic, and all the medicines were herbal.

 Why are we so attracted to traditions different than our own, and so determined to see them as more valid?  And why is the old always better than the new, when it comes to these things?

Worldwide, there's a longstanding cultural myth—yes, a tradition—in which human societies engage in conspiracy theories, firmly believing that their own culture is scamming them in one way or another. Our own governments, political systems, corporations, churches, priests, lawyers, doctors, and so on, are all secretly out to get us. "They" are hiding the truth. I've heard this so often over the years I'm tired of it. One would think, in America, that the majority of the population is engaged in evil, nefarious plots to take us down. In such minds, even the horrific events of 9/11 morph into a U.S. government plot.

Among some people I know, common Christianity takes a bad rap, and is treated with thinly veiled contempt; yet popular Buddhism somehow comes off with a clean bill of health, ignoring the fact that the deeply Buddhist culture of Japan produced individuals who committed some of the most awful atrocities of the Second World War. (Ask the Chinese about that sometime.)  It doesn't quite add up, does it?

We have a rejecting attitude towards ourselves. This isn't just a part of our culture; it comes from our own inner lives. Rejection begins at home.

 A view of our own culture, our own medicine, or our own science as deficient and out to deceive us exhibits a kind of paranoia, I think, that doesn't serve us well. It's certainly possible for us to more actively acknowledge the value in our own traditions, as well as those of others.

 One of my friends got Lyme disease last year.  An ardent naturalist, they tried to treat it homeopathically, right up until severe neurological symptoms began to turn up. At last, they agreed to take an aggressive course of antibiotics—which stopped the disease. Another course of action could've ended up ruining their life, and perhaps even taking it.

I think it underscores the fact that there are limits to our ideals which we need to recognize, in any practical world, and deal with.