Kalon Cheong
Traditional Chinese Medicine Essay (Final)
Medicine, which can be grown, synthesized, or mixed, supports our vitality, yet it comes in many forms, thus it is hard to see which form is the best. A form of medicine called “Traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM) is deeply rooted into the ancient history and the ancient philosophies of the Chinese. TCM utilizes natural herbs and natural animal products, and its origins are based on Chinese philosophy. By contrast, Western medicine relies on the use of chemicals and synthetic medicine using techniques such as boiling, mixing, and chemical reactions. I’ve drunk herbal teas ever since I was born in China; it was fairly effective. TCM is a very difficult form of medicine to understand from a western point of view since it’s not the same procedures as western medicine does. I’ve found it very interesting so I decided to work on a research project to see how it is utilized in today’s society, how it functions as a medicine and more importantly, does it even work?
TCM includes herbal remedies, acupuncture, “Qi Gong”, and “Tui Na.” All of these treatments usually follow the Yin Yang theory and the Qi theory. The Yin Yang theory stresses the idea of “Internal Balance” and how the two opposing forces (Yin and Yang) root together, transform each other, and balance each other. TCM focuses on restoring this internal balance in the body; any disruption in this balance will lead to sickness, disease, and pain. On the other hand, the Qi theory asserts that there is supposedly Qi (or Chi) running in a person’s body, and when the Qi disappears, the person dies. In other words, Qi is like a big tank of gas for a car. Qi is also known as the “life force” and it helps one’s body function normally and heals one’s body whenever he or she has a health problem. Acupuncture helps to redirect this Qi to the area in one’s body that is in pain. Qi runs in channels called meridians. Points are located all over the meridians; placing the needle on one of these points will aid the Qi reach a certain organ or area. There are several methods to restore this balance in the body. I’ve taken herbal remedies to treat my sicknesses such as the common cold, sore throat, and stomach ache. Herbal teas can be made up of 10 or more herbs and animal products, which are boiled up together and served hot. According to the book Trick or Treatment, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D., the authors of the book, claim that “Chinese herbal medicines usually contain a multitude of herbs which are individualized according to the specific needs of every patient” (328). Certain herbs heal certain parts of the body or certain ailments. For example, ginger is one herb that is commonly used to treat the cold.
The various forms of TCM have minimal side effects compared to conventional medicines. If so, why don’t many doctors use TCM in America? One can find many places that sell herbs and offer acupuncture and other treatments, such as in New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood. However, through the Scientific Method, scientists have found insufficient evidence for the reason to use alternative medicine. Western medicine attributes any TCM cure to the “placebo effect” and scientists think TCM is simply a scam for money. The placebo effect is when a patient thinks he/she is being treated, but in fact the medicine does not affect the patient at all. According to Singh and Ernst, “TCM is difficult to evaluate. Some elements may be effective for some conditions… (328).” America should study TCM more vigorously to filter out which forms actually work and which forms are ineffective. TCM, which uses natural ingredients and has fewer side effects, should be beneficial for the people.
So how often do Americans use alternative (or complementary) medicine? The article Tracing Herbal Remedies to Emergency Room Visits confirms that “A 1997 national survey indicated that about two out of five Americans use a complementary medicine, including herbal remedies and mega-vitamins. An unrelated study presented at last week’s conference, found that a third of 163 emergency-room patients at Morristown Memorial Hospital in New Jersey used herbal remedies.” Americans need to be aware of these herbal medicines and not use them recklessly. They need to know which herbs are effective and which herbs are poisonous or deadly. For example, “…such as the 15-year-old girl who went into liver failure after drinking a tea made with pennyroyal (C1+, Uhlman).” Pennyroyal is a poisonous herb with high amounts of pulegone, a type of oil extracted from plants like peppermint which gives out a pleasant smell but is toxic when consumed in large amounts. More doctors and professionals who can guide people that are interested in using these herbal remedies are needed in America.
Another form of traditional Chinese medicine is the ancient practice of acupuncture, which has been used for several thousand years. It looks like a false treatment since it involves putting needles into the meridians which have been mentioned earlier in points that link to certain organs. There is no physical evidence that shows that these meridians are real. When an acupuncturist puts the needle in a point, the point is solely based off a chart or based completely from knowledge. There have been many trials to see if acupuncture is physically effective or if it is just a placebo. The placebo effect was very common with treatments that did not make any scientific sense.
The “Perkins Patent Tractors” was a famous treatment made in the late 18th century. This treatment was made by Elisha Perkins, a US physician. Two 3 inch tractors (rods) are placed on the area where the person is having pain. These tractors supposedly alleviate the pain. This method mainly treated rheumatism (illness in heart, bones, joints, kidney, skin, and lungs), gout (buildup of uric acid on bones and joints causing swelling and pain), numbness, inflammation, and muscle weakness. The tractors were made of steel and brass, but according to Perkins, they were made of special metal alloys which, when rubbed on the area of pain, would “draw off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of suffering.” Perkins had helped about 5000 patients with this treatment.
However, a retired physician named John Haygarth was skeptical about Perkins’ tractor treatment. “He accepted that patients treated with Perkins’ tractors were indeed feeling better, but he speculated that the devices were essentially false and that their impact was on the mind, not the body (57, Ernst).” Haygarth decided to conduct a trial to find out if Perkins’ tractors were truly effective towards the patients or if they just tricked the mind. He wrote a letter to his colleague, William Falconer, who was a physician at the Bath General Hospital, to ask for his aid to conduct his experiment. Haygarth wrote:
“Prepare a pair of false Tractors, exactly to resemble the true Tractors. Let the secret be kept inviolable, not only from the patient but also from any other person. Let the efficacy of both be impartially tried and the reports of the effects produced by the true and false Tractors be fully given in the words of the patients (Letter to William Falconer).”
He planned to have two groups of patients treated with tractors; one group was to be treated with fake tractors (made of different materials than Perkins’ real ones) that resemble the real ones and the other group was to be treated with the real tractors (made of special alloy according to Perkins.) These patients were not informed that one pair of the tractors were fakes. The results were devastating; Ernst recorded that “patients reported precisely the same benefits whether they were being treated with real or fake tractors (56).” It’s amazing how nearly five thousand unknowing patients were actually mentally treated with a completely false treatment. This trial method is a great way to clear out any placebo treatments.
Acupuncture follows both the “Yin Yang theory” and “Qi theory.” It is hard to tell if acupuncture is truly physically effective due to the amount of people taking it around the world, the amount of time it was practiced for, and the way it is said to work seems unrealistic or flawed. Acupuncture is similar to Perkins’ tractor treatment as there isn’t any science behind it and that it is more of a belief. Acupuncture seems painful and fake, but it might actually work. It is best to try it yourself to discover the effects.
However, there is sufficient proof that acupuncture has been around for at least 5000 years. In 1991, mountain climbers discovered an iceman in the Otztal Alps. The mountain climbers thought he died not long ago due to the fact that he was well preserved from the low temperatures of the area. It turned out that he was actually around 5000 years old and that he died from hunger, blood loss and hypothermia. When an autopsy was performed on the body, “Scientists were surprised to discover several dark markings on the Iceman’s skin that appear to be tattoos. The marks occur on the Iceman’s back, legs, and ankles. The tattoos were found on parts of the body that are often used for acupuncture, a traditional Chinese form of pain relief that uses needles inserted into specific places on the body. The tattoos suggest that acupuncture, or a similar treatment, may have developed in different societies around the world and earlier than was previously thought (World Book Online Reference Center).”
If acupuncture had been practiced for that long, why hasn’t it been flawed out if it was entirely false? Today, people all over the world still accept the method as an effective medical treatment. However, to many westerners, acupuncture seems false because there isn’t any chemistry or scientific proof that shows that the therapy works. The procedure follows a set of philosophies rather than evidence and science.
Trials conducted showed that acupuncture was actually a placebo treatment and that when these needles were put into different areas and were not done properly, the patient still showed satisfaction. Ernst states that acupuncture’s method does not seem realistic. Ernst also states that “The traditional principles of acupuncture are deeply flawed, as there is no evidence at all to demonstrate the existence of Ch’i or meridians (83).” It is difficult to prove if acupuncture is truly effective since trials could be biased or manipulated. There is also the risk of human error. According to research done by Singh and Ernst, “The number of patients in the trials ranged from 200 to over 1000. Each trial divided its patients into three groups: the first group received no acupuncture, the second group received real acupuncture, and the third (placebo) group received sham acupuncture (82). How can one know if these people were really grouped into random groups? Did the publishers tamper with the data? However, all the data and research compiled over time concludes that “acupuncture increasingly looks as if it is nothing more than a placebo (82, Ernst).”
We can conclude that acupuncture is a placebo for now, but another question arises – is a placebo treatment really bad? It helps a patient, despite the fact that it actually does not treat the body at all, but the mind instead. Acupuncture would make a great painkiller, especially during surgery. Placebo treatments will help when there is a lack of supply in certain medicines. Ernst describes a moment in World War II when a military field doctor was forced to use a placebo to alleviate a soldier’s pain.
“…towards the end of the Second World War, when a lack of morphine at a military field hospital forced him to try an extraordinary experiment. Rather than treating a wounded soldier without morphine, he injected saline into the patient and suggested to the soldier that he was receiving a powerful painkiller… the patient relaxed immediately and showed no signs of pain, distress or shock (58, Ernst).”
Eventually, people would know that acupuncture is in fact false (if there is more research done to prove that) and will lose faith in the treatment. Acupuncture will slowly die and will be rendered useless. Then again, we still do not have a clear answer of whether alternative medicine as a whole is effective.
Which treatments are placebos and which treatments are real? So far, we proved acupuncture to be a placebo and herbal medicine to be both beneficial and dangerous, depending on the type of herb. Why does America put so much effort into conventional medicine when there could be more advantages in herbal medicines? America is a powerful country, as we are considered the smartest, strongest, and richest country, compared to other countries, yet our own people lack knowledge of herbal and therapeutic medicine. We know that such treatments exist but we decide not to use them or associate with them. It is possible that the public lacks knowledge of these different types of medicine or that the government doesn’t want people to take alternative medicine. There are billion dollar industries that could be sabotaged if the government showed more possibilities in medicine such as herbal medicine.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knows about a lot of potential foods that can help many diseases. An article called Medicine War: Will Alternative and Mainstream Medicine Ever Be Friends says,
“Last March, under the headline ‘Soybeans Hit Main Street,’ an article in THE SCIENTIST hailed the arrival of the soy product tofu, including the precedent-setting (for alternative medicines at least) approval by the Food and Drug Administration, after reviewing forty-one studies, of a soy dosage of 25 grams a day to help prevent heart disease (28, Seidman).”
The point is that the public needs to be more knowledgeable in medicine and that doctors need to inform their patients about simple treatments and herbs that can help fix their health problems instead of directing them to take pills that have serious side effects. I use both western medicine and herbal teas and I feel that it is great to use whichever I feel is more effective. However, people must know the right people to visit for these medicines or they are in great risk of danger.
There needs to be a wider variety of medicine open to the public. Patients should know that many treatments are possible. This tip also applies to the people who take alternative medicine only. According to a survey I conducted, 7 out of 9 people who are White/Caucasian US citizens take western medicine only, 1 person doesn’t know what they take, and the other person takes both western medicine and alternative medicine (Medicine Use Survey). There are many different ways to treat a sickness, but people also need to know which medicine best to treat the sickness as well. Doctors need to learn about alternative medicine and conventional medicine to know which of the two is best for their patients. Very little attention is paid to alternative medicine and the public believes that it’s not as good as conventional medicine or that it has dangerous side effects; these two facts are both true, depending of what medicine they are talking about. I take both types of medicine, depending on which one I feel is better for a certain sickness, but as a person of Chinese heritage, it is common to take both. I already know what type of doctor I want to be; I am currently learning about both types of medicine and making use of both of them. However, will traditional Chinese medicine ever be utilized along with western medicine in America? Only the American medicine consumers can answer that question.
Annotated Bibliography:
“Iceman.” World Book Online Reference Center. 2009. [nypl.org] 19 Jan. 2009 .
This source gave me some information about Otzi the Iceman. It gave me a brief summary and is pretty trustable since it’s an online reference center. I decided not to use this source for other things because it was pretty concise and short brief information not too detailed.
Singh, Simon, and Edzard Ernst. Trick or Treatment : The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2008.
This book was one of my major sources because the purpose of the book was similar to the purpose of this essay. It compared alternative medicines and conventional medicines from evidence and research. This book looked into many different types and into specifics; it is a great source that helped me a lot in writing my essay.
Seidman, Barry F. (Jan./Feb. 2001). Medicine War: Will Alternative and Mainstream Medicine Ever Be Friends? Skeptical Inquirer, pp. 28-35. Retrieved Dec. 13, 2008 from ProQuest database (ProQuest k-12).
This article shows me some information and facts about America’s view on alternative medicine. The title itself was what attracted me to the article; I cited the part where it talked about the relationship and statistics about Americans and alternative medicine.
Uhlman, Marian. (Oct. 30, 2000). Tracing Herbal Remedies to Emergency Room Visits. Philadelphia Inquirer, C1+. Retrieved Dec. 13, 2008 from ProQuest database (ProQuest k-12).
Haygarth, John. Letter to William Falconer. 1799.
This letter showed how the US physician responded and his procedure to finding out if the Perkins’ tractor treatment was a placebo. This source was very important as it showed the reader how a placebo could be found from a series of test and such.
Cheong, Kalon. “Medicine Use.” Survey. 7 Dec. 2008. .
This was my personal survey, it showed how teens used medicine and helped me understand how much of them use alternative medicine rather than conventional medicine. I asked many questions to see how much they knew about different types of treatments. I used this survey to show the reader the knowledge and use of medicine from US White citizens.
(c) Kalon Cheong 2009
