Hong Kong seeks to put traditional Chinese medicine on the map

High time ! Basil jide fadipe.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has nothing to do with evidence-based medicine and everything to do with the Chinese Communist Party's need to affordably provide "healthcare" to the billion people living in China. The history of attempts to put TCM on a more scientific footing have shown that the better the study, the smaller the benefit. Systematic reviews of research on alternative medicine routinely exclude research outputs from China because of the persistent publication bias. The Chinese government's policy is that TCM works and any Chinese research group saying otherwise will find their route to funding suddenly filled with obstacles. Research has shown repeatedly that many TCM interventions (cupping, acupuncture, herbal medicine) are merely elaborate placebos - or actively harmful. Alternative medicine and TCM is often described as harmless nonsense, but chiropractic regularly causes people strokes, people have died from tainted batches of herbal medicine, and the greatest threat of all is the avoidance of genuine healthcare caused by people putting their faith in TCM practitioners. "Integrative" medicine is simply another euphemism for alternative medicine. If any of these interventions worked, they would already have been "integrated" into mainstream evidence-based medicine.