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The Enigma of Chinese Medicine - NYTimes.com

30/09/13 10:58

SEPTEMBER 28, 2013, 3:00 PM

The Enigma of Chinese Medicine
By STEPHEN T. ASMA

A few years ago, while visiting Beijing, I caught a cold. My wife, who is Chinese, and wanted
me to feel better, took me to a local restaurant. After we sat down, she ordered a live turtle.
The proprietors sent it over. I startled as the waitersunceremoniously cut the turtle’s throat,
then poured its blood into a glass. To this frightening prospect, they added a shot of baijiu,
very strong grain alcohol. The proprietor and waiters, now tableside, gestured with obvious
pride for me to drink the potent medicine. I winced, found the courage, and drank up.
I felt better later that night and in the days that followed, but I wasn’t surewhy. Was it the
placebo effect? Perhaps my body was already on the mend that night, rendering the medicine
superfluous. Or did the turtle blood-baijiu potion speed my recovery? Maybe in years to come
we will discover some subtle chemical properties in turtle blood that ameliorate certain
illnesses.
Many Westerners will scoff at the very idea that turtle blood could have medicinal effects. Butat least some of those same people will quaff a tree-bark tincture or put on an eggplant
compress recommended by Dr. Oz to treat skin cancer. We are all living in the vast gray area
between leech-bleeding and antibiotics. Alternative medicine has exploded in recent years,
reawakening a philosophical problem that epistemologists call the “demarcation problem.”
The demarcation problem isprimarily the challenge of distinguishing real science from
pseudoscience. It often gets trotted out in the fight between evolutionists and creation
scientists. In that tired debate, creationism is usually dismissed on the grounds that its
claims cannot be falsified (evidence cannot prove or disprove its natural theology beliefs).
This criterion of “falsifiability” was originally formulated by KarlPopper, perhaps the most
influential philosopher of science of the 20th century, and, at first blush, it seems like a good
one — it nicely rules out the spooky claims of pseudoscientists and snake oil salesmen. Or
does it?
The contemporary philosopher of science Larry Laudan claims that philosophers have failed
to give credible criteria for demarcating science from pseudoscience. Evenfalsifiability, the
benchmark for positivist science, rules out many of the legitimate theoretical claims of
cutting-edge physics, and rules in many wacky claims, like astrology — if the proponents are
clever about which observations corroborate their predictions. Moreover, historians of
science since Thomas Kuhn have pointed out that legitimate science rarely abandons a theoryhttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/the-enigma-of-chinese-medicine/?_r=0&pagewanted=print

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The Enigma of Chinese Medicine - NYTimes.com

30/09/13 10:58

the moment falsifying observations come in, preferring instead (sometimes for decades) to
chalk up counter evidence to experimental error. The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend
even gave up altogether on a so-called scientificmethod, arguing that science is not a special
technique for producing truth but a flawed species of regular human reasoning (loaded with
error, bias and rhetorical persuasion). And finally, increased rationality doesn’t always
decrease credulity.
We like to think that a rigorous application of logic will eliminate kooky ideas. But it doesn’t.
Even a person as well versed in induction anddeduction as Arthur Conan Doyle believed that
the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamen expedition, may have been
caused by a pharaoh’s curse.
The issue of alternative medicine, especially Traditional Chinese Medicine (T.C.M.), brings
fresh passion to the demarcation problem. Americans are gravitating to acupuncture and
herbal medicines (less so the zoological pharmacology, like...