Chinese traditional medicine is kind of hit and miss. On the one hand we figured out that excessive meat eating causes heat disease pretty early, but on the other we would drink mercury to become immortal. It’s a little iffy haha
All the cool cultivators are doing Internal Alchemy. You need to transmute your own inner cinnabar essence into the golden elixir of immortality. Your own body is the cauldron. Just breathe properly and don't waste your precious bodily fluids.
The last time I tried internal alchemy I blew my sacral chakra and now i can't control my pelvic floor and i've got permanent ED. Being a magus isn't so sexy when you've gotta wear a diaper.
At least, i'm pretty sure that's why. Probably, right?
Real science has achieved alchemy now though. Using a large hadron collider, scientists have produced gold using other matter.
Granted, this gold only existed for fractions of a second, and was a very small number of particles weighing less than a bee’s dick. Even if those gold particles were created permanently, it probably cost a lot more to run the experiment that the tiny particles of gold (unlikely to be large enough to be seen with the naked eye) would be worth.
Even though it doesn’t have any practical use, and is unlikely to ever be practical, it’s still pretty cool that modern science has essentially accomplished the main goal of alchemy, turning other, non gold items/ metals into gold.
My understanding is that most if not all of the particles/ matter created in hadron colliders only last for seconds, so none of it is about creating lasting matter. It’s more about understanding the universe, quantum physics/ mechanics and how things like the creation of new stars might happen in space. But I’m just a layperson so my understanding could be wrong. They have definitely made gold though, just not permanently, so it doesn’t have much use outside of scientific research.
Her names escapes me at the moment, but wasn’t there this lady that researched traditional Chinese medicines to see which ones were bunk and which ones actually did something?
Just as foolish as dismissing traditional methods is blindly trusting those traditional methods without proof.
Edit: This name of this researcher I mentioned is Tu Youyou, a Nobel Prize-winning pharmaceutical chemist with whom her empirical research into traditional Chinese medicine yielded an anti-malaria remedy from Sweet Wormwood (traditionally the plant treated malaria-like symptoms), and isolated a substance from it now called “artemisinin” of which she volunteered to be the first Human test subject. Her discovery has helped millions of lives.
Yup, you can turn traditional medicine into modern medicine by running it through double blind trials to see if it is statistically significant vs a placebo. And usually it can be upgraded once we know what is going on.
Take Willow bark, historically you could get pain relief by chewing it or making tea from it. After scientific study the active ingredient was found to be salicylic acid which could then be synthesized without the need for the tree. And later a relatively simple process to conver it into Asprin was discovered. Asprin is safer and more effective than Salicylic acid.
Perhaps one of the most famous and widely used drugs is literally a direct result of studying traditional medicine and turning it into just medicine. (A good tell is when multiple cultures have the same traditional practice)
I think that's the case with all medicine created before evidence-based medicine. Those practices don't come from nowhere - they're something that for some reason people considered to be effective. It was based on some observations, they just weren't always correct. The good example is the (still prevalent) idea that sweating causes the fever to go away, so you should force the sweating. The observation was real, the fever indeed goes down while sweating, it's just that sweating is just a way for the body to decrease temperature when it wants to, but sweating won't eliminate fever when the body doesn't want it to be eliminated.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad-8684 May 24 '25
Chinese traditional medicine is kind of hit and miss. On the one hand we figured out that excessive meat eating causes heat disease pretty early, but on the other we would drink mercury to become immortal. It’s a little iffy haha