featured

Science vs. Chinese Medicine in Today’s World

By Gory ⋅ August 23, 2006 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

- Donald Rumsfeld, Poetic Militant of the most recent Bush Administration

Chinese Medicine worked for my aunt, says she. She had a thyroid problem all these years and finally decided to use inconvenient form of healing. It was amazing that she actually consumed those herbs for a full year and a half – and she was skeptical – but then the improvements came. The improvements were tremendous, so good she decided to share her good news with me.

Are my aunt’s assertions as good as the results of a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled experiment?

On one hand, it is, as long as I believe my aunt as much as you believe in that kind of experiment. On the other hand, if I had to make a decision regarding the use of Chinese Medicine in broader society, then such experiments are very important. These experiments are “scientific,” one would say. But what is it to be scientific, really?

To answer this inquiry, maybe we can begin by imagining a world where we have no knowledge apart from what we experience. This is often the world of a newborn – where she is given no conceptual knowledge apart from what she is able to observe, experience and make sense of. You can imagine this little child taking in all manner of sensory stimuli and slowly forming a worldview from her experiences alone.

For example, if her mom were to carry her every time she cries, this repetition of observable phenomena translates into a fact that “If I cry, mom will carry me and show me concern.” Without knowing it, the baby has formed a hypothesis that she treats as “true,” that crying (the cause) results in her being carried (the effect). Her hypothesis is testable and repeatable, but not necessarily unbiased (something worth discussing in a separate article).

Now, this is what being scientific is. We do it all the time, and as I’d demonstrated above, even babies do it. Science is, a method of knowing, of gaining knowledge of the world around us, with the assumption that we are rational and orderly and that the world around us is too.

The idea of unbiasness gives a character of universality to this method – that this is true not just in this one situation, but also in other situations — and can be abstracted to be true in all situations. This degree of abstraction, the newborn is not able to put into effect, until of course, damned or otherwise, she begins to be “educated,” which, to to be fair, helps every dude get up to speed on the prevailing knowledge of our times.

Unbiasness is a degree of abstraction even the educated man has little interest in sustaining, Which is why we have experiments, and scientists who put them into effect. Many of these experiments choose random subjects from as broad a population as possible, and attempt to make sure no one knows what really is happening. Each observation is akin to that baby’s cry. The combined result of all the observations will allow us to make an assertion, called a hypothesis. Ludicrous as it seems, such is how we attempt to bring certainty to knowledge – which are hypotheses or theories not yet proven wrong. These theories are treated as true unless proven otherwise, and are very important when making medical decisions that affect broader society, if only because they are the best bet for assuring all of us living humans that the sick among us receive treatments that actually work well enough.

The standardized language of Science provides us a sensible method of understanding worldly phenomenon. Sometimes it doesn’t just tell you how well it works, it might even give hints as to why it worked. This is how Science differs from my aunt – she doesn’t give me a how and why.

Popularity: 1% [?]