In TCM Research, What Matters Is Moving Forward, Not Arguing
Traditional Chinese medicine faces enormous questioning and debate in the present era. Everyone who cultivates the field of TCM encounters all kinds of doubt, censure, and controversy. If one visits forums such as Tianya or Mop, countless people can be found who wish to see TCM eradicated once and for all. Internal debates within the TCM community are also extremely fierce: Should TCM return to the ancients or be modernized? Who is right—the Jingfang (classical formula) school, the Shifang (contemporary formula) school, or the various schools founded by individual physicians? Once these controversies break out, it is like a great duel in the martial arts world.
And when a TCM physician steps out to practice, the number of criticisms he faces is likewise countless. Prescriptions are censured by peers, doubted by patients and their families; therapeutic outcomes fall short of expectation; all kinds of unfavorable news come pouring in—and it is easy for someone who has studied medicine to be broken by all this.
Those who truly cannot be broken, who survive on the final battlefield, are only those who have personally experienced the efficacy of TCM and yet love it. After weathering all kinds of worldly affairs and settling down, these people become the backbone of the TCM community. Only TCM scholars who fear no censure can in the end become comprehensive masters of Chinese medicine.
Medicine is an awkward profession, because a physician's clinical cure rate is never 100%. Looking across the globe, whether in TCM or Western medicine, physicians whose clinical efficacy exceeds 40% are few and far between. Those whose clinical efficacy reaches 50% can be regarded as the elite of the medical world. Yet in the fields of the world's hardest medical problems—advanced tumors, asthma, hepatitis B, sequelae of stroke—most physicians have very low clinical effective rates. These are precisely the areas most open to criticism, and human medicine is unfortunately riddled with too many such difficult problems.
Patients and the general public lack understanding of medicine and place overly high expectations on clinical outcomes. When physicians cannot meet patients' expectations, it is hardly surprising that patients and their families harbor resentment, and even beat or kill physicians. A physician must have sufficient psychological resilience not to care about these things and to press forward in medicine as always. Because medicine always requires someone to invest heart's blood in research before it can advance.
In this era, it is entirely normal for TCM to be questioned. TCM has long contained much dross. Removing the weeds and preserving the essence, and thereby advancing the development of TCM, is what those truly committed to the cause of Chinese medicine ought to do. And this requires many people to devote their lifelong energy, drilling deep into the theory and practice of TCM, day after day, year after year, laying a deep foundation so that quantitative change may eventually give rise to qualitative change. Only then can the essence of this ancient medicine be preserved and a due contribution made to the cause of human health.
As a practitioner of TCM, I have no doubt whatsoever about its efficacy. Beyond that, I smile and dismiss all the controversies surrounding TCM—and, in time to come, all the controversies surrounding myself. Life is too short, after all, to spend it bickering and nursing resentments.