…What I do want to highlight is that the Chinese state and people take TCM very seriously, that it has played a significant role in their pandemic response, and that you would really not know this from the mainstream Western media. Our understanding of the pandemic in China is framed by our own conceptions of medicine and the social networks established by our scientists with their opposite numbers in China.
China has a long independent tradition of medical thought which has not been subject to the radical discontinuity introduced in Western societies and colonies during the nineteenth century by scientific approaches. Its analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic draws as freely on 16th and 17th century writings as Western science draws on last month’s journals. This tradition has been nurtured by the Chinese state which supports TCM medical schools and practitioners alongside education and practice in Western scientific traditions. The leadership expects that professionals working in these traditions will collaborate to produce an integrated model that combines the best features of each…
…Chinese health care operates under strong pressures from the national leadership to combine both medical systems in the empirical treatment of patients. Writing purely about the parts that are recognizable to Western readers risks misleading them about how the Chinese response actually operates and about what is contributing to reported outcomes. Studies of medicine in China must not neglect Chinese medicine.