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Published online 12 November 2008 | Nature 456, 152 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456152a
News in Brief
WHO congress backs traditional medicine
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The role of process or function in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is the same as the one of state or structure in modern sciences so that TCM might be called process medicine. As process philosophy become more popular, TCM become more important. For the detailed discussion, please refer the following paper Liu TCY, Jiao JL, Xu XY, Lu J, Deng XY and Liu SH. 2005. Process Theory ? The Bridge of the Eastern and Western Culture. IN: Jandl MJ and Greiner K. Science, Medicine and Culture Festschrift for Fritz G. Wallner. Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH. 2005:165-175.
A process is very complicated, but it can be represented by a few principal components (PCs) within the framework of principal component analysis (PCA)and metabonomics/metabolomics. We have studied Chinese swimming athletes. First void urine samples of 18 male athletes, who were training for the swimming competition at Doha Asian games in 2006, were collected once a week for 3 consecutive weeks in a month before the games. Samples were analyzed by 1H NMR Spectroscopy. 409 data were from each urine sample after data reduction from 1H NMR spectra. After PCA, we have found finalists can be distinguished from non-finalists by only two PCs, PC3 and PC25, which represent the swimming capacity.
According to my viewpoint on TCM, yin and yang are two coupled processes, and five zangs, six fus and twelve meridians are five, six and twelve coupled processes, respectively. The many coupled processes are cohenrently integrated to form the perfect state, yin ping yang mi, which correspond to function-specific homeostasis (FSH). FSH is one of the most remarkable and most typical properties of highly complex open systems. Such a system reacts to every change in the environment, or to every random disturbance, through a series of modifications of equal size and opposite direction to those that created the disturbance. The goal of these modifications is to maintain the function.
Not only are the active ingredients difficult to isolate -- randomized controlled trials fail to show that "traditional" medicines are even active at all. One can come up with an infinite number of acronyms and theoretical entities with no physical basis or mechanism, or cite an endless number of irreproducible results from obscure journals, but ultimately the proof for such "treatments" is lacking.
people of the past live longer than of today..traditional medicine accounts for their survival.By this, traditional medicine should be given a foothold to emancipate us from the burden of multiple adversity driven effects of synthetics drugs...
What? The average lifespan used to be less than 40 years old. Where do you get your information from? Is it standard practice for "traditional" / homeopathic / whatever medicine proponents just to make stuff up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy