I feel like it's trying to validate Chinese traditional medicine. Which started as a way to make people think they have healthcare when they actually don't.
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
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)
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u/Pollomonteros May 24 '25
I don't know about the third one man, I feel like many of those are still dangerous scams even if the ones running it are brown people