ISO/TS 17948:2014 health information traditional chinese medicine literature metedata

Courtesy: ISO/TS 17948:2014 health information traditional chinese medicine literature metedata

At the beginning of Hong Kong’s opening up, Western medicine was not yet popular, and Western medicine doctors were mostly foreigners; local residents mostly relied on Chinese medicine practitioners. In 1841, the British government of Hong Kong issued an announcement pledging to govern Hong Kong residents in accordance with all the original rituals, customs and private legal property rights. As traditional Chinese medicine had always been used in China, the use of traditional Chinese medicine was not regulated.

The establishment in 1870 of the Tung Wah Hospital was the first use of Chinese medicine for the treatment in Chinese hospitals providing free medical services. As the promotion of Western medicine by the British government started from 1940, Western medicine started being popular among Hong Kong population. In 1959, Hong Kong had researched the use of traditional Chinese medicine to replace Western medicine.

Critique

Historians of science have developed the study of medicine in traditional China into a field with its own scholarly associations, journals, graduate programs, and debates with each other. Many distinguish “medicine in traditional China” from the recent Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which took elements from traditional texts and practices to construct a systematic body. Paul Unschuld, for instance, sees a “departure of TCM from its historical origins.”  What is called “Traditional Chinese Medicine” and practiced today in China and the West is not thousands of years old, but recently constructed using selected traditional terms, some of which have been taken out of context, some badly misunderstood. He has criticized Chinese and Western popular books for selective use of evidence, choosing only those works or parts of historical works that seem to lead to modern medicine, ignoring those elements that do not now seem to be effective.

A 2007 editorial the journal Nature wrote that TCM “remains poorly researched and supported, and most of its treatments have no logical mechanism of action.” Critics say that TCM theory and practice have no basis in modern science, and TCM practitioners do not agree on what diagnosis and treatments should be used for any given person. A Nature editorial described TCM as “fraught with pseudoscience”. A review of the literature in 2008 found that scientists are “still unable to find a shred of evidence” according to standards of science-based medicine for traditional Chinese concepts such as qi, meridians, and acupuncture points, and that the traditional principles of acupuncture are deeply flawed. “Acupuncture points and meridians are not a reality”, the review continued, but “merely the product of an ancient Chinese philosophy”. In June 2019, the World Health Organization included traditional Chinese medicine in a global diagnostic compendium, but a spokesman said this was “not an endorsement of the scientific validity of any Traditional Medicine practice or the efficacy of any Traditional Medicine intervention