The Overall Level Of Contemporary TCM Is The Highest In Its History
Traditional Chinese medicine, aided by modern science and technology, has developed rapidly. The combination of TCM with modern technology represents great progress rather than regression. Although some traditional therapies and Chinese medicines have left the historical stage, on the whole the fact that TCM has advanced by leaps and bounds in the present era is beyond dispute. The integration of TCM into modern medicine is an irreversible trend; we should welcome the progress of Chinese medicine rather than whining needlessly that TCM is finished.
I deeply dislike people who trade on their age and nostalgically long for the old ways, always wishing to return to history. As someone who has studied TCM for seventeen years, I have read a great deal of TCM literature and known many older-generation physicians. My grandfather's and father's generation told me that when they were children, few people in the whole village were over fifty; when the village gathered its elders for major clan events, the over-fifty elders could not fill a single table. Nowadays, people over eighty are everywhere. China's health care has made great strides, and average life expectancy has been continually rising.
TCM is extremely valuable because it is a means of fighting disease that our ancestors discovered through practical life experience to be genuinely effective. Humankind still has a long way to go before being completely free from the torment of disease. Drawing wisdom from TCM, studying it, and achieving innovation in this field are all beneficial and harmless both to the development of TCM and to human health.
In the time of Zhang Zhongjing, the great master of TCM, when plague raged, two-thirds of his own clan died of it, and Zhang himself was helpless. His Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage) is precious, but objectively speaking, the effective rate of its formulas was not high. In the Jin-Yuan period, Li Dongyuan was a great master, and his teachers Liu Wansu and Zhang Yuansu were giants in the field; yet a single plague at that time killed over a million people in the capital alone within a few months. This shows how extremely low the overall medical level then was. The medical techniques and theories they created were still very elementary and need to be re-examined and improved if TCM is to yield better results.
Our younger generation, devoting itself to TCM research, can innovate only if it dares to break through old rules and challenge authority. The effective rate of traditional TCM is not high—this is an undeniable fact. An old TCM physician whose clinical effective rate reaches forty percent is already a very good physician. Note that "effective rate" is not the same as cure rate: the effective rate is the probability of achieving temporary improvement, whereas the cure rate is the probability of the patient being completely cured.
A person engaged in medicine and health care should not be satisfied with such a low effective rate, and this also falls short of patients' expectations. Raising clinical efficacy should be a physician's lifelong, untiring pursuit. From this standpoint, if we rigidly cling to everything in traditional TCM and grow lazy about progress, that is a sign of ignorance and backwardness—not cherishing the heritage of our ancestors. What the cause of TCM needs is not die-hard defenders but constructive disruptors.