Among expats living in China there is a segment who are in awe of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It’s easy to pick out those in this segment not only because they call it TCM and bring up the subject often, this latter one hallmark of a zealot, but also because their voices take on an all-capital-letter tone when doing so.

TCM. I’ve never heard so much nonsense as the worship of Chinese ancient cultures and quasi-mystical science in all my life, and that even includes listening to US politics.

There are thousands of plants that are recommended for hundreds of illnesses and mental states. Some of these recommendations turn out to be right. This would be guaranteed by simple probability even in the face of random predictions. The Chinese drink and recommend green tea for practically everything, for example, and green tea is indeed in general good for your health because its anti-oxidants impact a number of human systems in beneficial ways. The Chinese also recommend lots and lots and lots of other things. Some of their recommendations are even useful. New Englanders eat cranberries, which are good for your health too, but the Chinese won’t touch them. But we don’t worship NewEnglanders as the source of some mystical healing knowledge just because having eaten the local foods it turned out that one of them was good for one’s health.

The problem is that these ancient Chinese recommendations are not based on any sound process. Yes, they turn out to be right sometimes in the same way a broken clock is right sometimes. A Chinese acquaintance told me very seriously about the constant nosebleeds she’d suffered for years. Her TCM doctor told her these were normal. His reasoning was that other older folks in her family had suffered them too. Ergo, ‘normal’ and nothing can or should be done about them. I asked if many of her older family members had died young, and she was surprised by my question. Turned out many had. Then she told me about the time that her nose ran continuously for several days until she felt faint (she didn’t see this as any contradiction of her TCM practitioner’s assurance or advice). In this case her father brought home some garlic and ginger, chopped them up, and applied them to the soles of her feet to balance out her yin-yang, or whatever. After about 10 minutes, her nosebleed stopped, thus proving that the foot-poltice was a remedy for nosebleeds.

I asked her how the foot poultice could’ve helped. She explained again about it stopping afterward, as if I didn’t get the infallible logic. I posed a hypothetical: if she goes outside and it is not raining, and she puts up her umbrella then 10 minutes later it starts to rain, did she CAUSE the rain by opening her umbrella?  She was stumped. In fact, I think she was trying to remember if that had ever happened, in order to determine whether she had some power over the weather that had escaped her notice before. I tried to explain that because something precedes something else doesn’t prove or even imply any cause and effect. That there has to be some plausible mechanism, some way that the first-goer could feasibly have effected any change in the later event. Her intellect could simply not take it in. She began telling me about the incredible magic of TCM and I knew that I’d found a counter-factual thinker. Ratiocination not a tool in her tool-chest, so to speak.

The more I hear about TCM theories the more I realize that TCM is mostly nonsense, with the occasional hit in the dark that anyone (with any knowledge of probability) would expect to find. (Unfortunately, the many tortured and mutilated bears make clear that the nonsense is not necessarily harmless. Google China bear bile if you don’t know what I mean). Without a process for discovery and verification that might lead them systematically toward knowledge, their outcomes are bound to be right the same way a broken clock is right. This ancient-past worship blocks them from understanding rationality or making use of it. Sure, let’s test out some of the precepts, especially those like consuming natural foods that have been consumed for a long while, suggesting that they are at least harmless, but let’s don’t mistake them for ancient wisdom.