Speaking of Chinese medicine, what impressed me the most was bowls of black and bitter medicine juice. I remember when I was a child, the old man at home was sick, and the family had a faint bitterness because of boiling medicine. Miraculously, I don't think it stinks, but it smells good, which is more comfortable than smelling perfume. Later, when I saw a dream of red mansions, Jia Baoyu said, "medicine is more elegant than flowers." I suddenly felt that I had found a bosom friend.
Of course, I didn't feel fragrant and elegant after drinking Chinese medicine myself. I hold my nose and drink, and then eat sugar, otherwise my mouth will be bitter. In my memory, the most interesting thing about traditional Chinese medicine is the lesson my elders taught me: after taking medicine, I should throw the dregs out on the road, that is, I should drive the disease out of my house, not at my own door or at someone else's door.
This custom exists not only in rural areas, but also in cities. I stepped on the dregs when I went out the other day. Of course, we know that this taboo is just a traditional superstition. If you really throw the dregs on the road, you can take away the sick gas and cure the disease with medicine. Then why use the hospital? It is precisely because Chinese medicine is associated with many mysterious superstitions that many people think that Chinese medicine is pseudoscience, full of superstitions and totally dependent on nonsense.
But when I heard Wang Fuzhong, a postdoctoral fellow and "famous" economist in Peking University, talking about TCM, I was still dumbfounded: How did he become a professor and head of the department? Wang Fuzhong often appears in TV programs, and people familiar with him must know that he once said that "farmers are just brute force, which is useless to the country" and "soldiers fight for vanity in bullets" and other uncomfortable remarks.
For Chinese medicine, Wang Fuzhong has his own explanation. In "Chinese medicine is a deliberate liar", he criticized Chinese medicine from beginning to end:
"The so-called profoundness of Chinese medicine is fooling around; The so-called question is that the blind touch the elephant; The so-called treatment is not for the sake of treatment; The so-called long history means that there is no progress; The so-called treasure of ancestors is to pretend to be a ghost; The so-called dialectical treatment is to be at a loss; The so-called slow curative effect, even to death is not effective; The so-called acupuncture is to give some blood to scare you; The so-called holistic therapy is that you have a headache and he pinches your feet; The so-called disease prevention is to find a disease without disease; The so-called Chinese medicine health care is to spend money to buy sin; The so-called hanging pot helps the world, which means cheating to eat and drink. "
Wang Fuzhong believes that Chinese medicine is our culture, and real medicine has come, so this kind of thing should be swept into the museum and treated as backward history. If TCM belongs to medicine and is a great work in the world, then Zhuangzi can be regarded as a work of calculus. Chinese medicine can only cure one disease, that is, colds, and doctors in western medicine are better. They will tell you that you don't need to take medicine for a cold, just go back and drink more hot water to rest.
The original text is rather lengthy, so I won't show them here. But from these viewpoints, we can see that Wang Fuzhong's contempt for TCM has reached an irreconcilable level. At the beginning, he declared that economists are also qualified to talk about Chinese medicine. "I don't know anything about jumping, feng shui and witchcraft. I don't know that these stupid things are my pride. You know, that only shows your ignorance. "
Personally, I don't quite understand this view and this logic. First of all, according to Wang Fuzhong, Chinese medicine is completely useless and can only represent the backwardness and ignorance of China's traditional culture. Our traditional culture is useless? I don't think anyone with national pride in China will agree. If it doesn't work, how can we continue 5 thousand years of civilization? Tradition has dross, which must be admitted, but saying that it is dross is tantamount to extreme cultural inferiority, which is also not conducive to our progress.
Secondly, Wang Fuzhong thinks that western medicine is more scientific, but he doesn't speak with data, but only talks about how Chinese medicine is inferior to western medicine in terms of words and emotions. Isn't this a paradox in itself? We don't need facts as the basis, but only rely on a "personal intuition" to summarize our statement. What's even more ridiculous is that Wang Fuzhong suggested that Chinese medicine never cured the diseases of the ancients, and that the ancients could survive because of personal immunity.
We can't deny that immunity is a very important thing, but even western medicine (accurately called modern medicine, which is not contradictory to traditional Chinese medicine) admits that people's immune system will need medication when the defense line collapses. If we are sick and totally immune, should Wang Fuzhong promise not to go to any hospital in this life? Otherwise, how to prove his point of view is correct?
Back to TCM itself, TCM has a long history and can be traced back to primitive society. At that time, our ancestors found that eating some animals and plants would have adverse reactions, but eating other animals and plants could relieve discomfort. After a long period of exploration, they gradually summed up a set of treatment plans, which is the earliest Chinese medicine, and the story of "Shennong tasted a hundred herbs" came from this.
Later, many famous doctors appeared in China (Bian Que, Hua Tuo, Zhang Zhongjing, Huangfu Mi, Sun Simiao, Xue, Song Ci, Li Shizhen, Ge Hong, etc. They sorted out and recorded the theories, clinical experiments and empirical prescriptions of traditional Chinese medicine, and many of their knowledge did not lag behind in modern times. Remember Tu Youyou who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine? Tu Youyou has encountered difficulties in developing new antimalarial drugs. She opened Ge Hong's Elbow Reserve Emergency Prescription in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and found this passage in the Prescription for Treating Cold, Heat and Malaria:
"Take Artemisia annua, dye it with two liters of water, and squeeze the juice to take it." Based on this, Tu Youyou speculated that wringing juice is special, which may be to avoid the destruction of effective components of Artemisia annua by high temperature caused by traditional decocting methods. According to this idea, she continued to develop experiments and finally made a major breakthrough. Tu Youyou said that his achievements could not be separated from Chinese medicine. Should we believe what we see or an economist who equates Chinese medicine with witchcraft?
1928 the winner of the nobel prize in physiology or medicine is Charles Nicolle, a Frenchman. What is his achievement? Make sure that lice are carriers of typhus. And this conclusion was discovered by Ge Hong over 1600 years ago! In his elbow standby emergency prescription, it is recorded that "there are sand lice in the mountains and waters", which will lead to acute infection and death. I guess Wang Fuzhong has never read this book. Otherwise, he should know that Ge Hong, as an ancient man, also pointed out that many infectious diseases are not caused by ghosts and gods, but things we can't see, that is, bacteria and viruses that we all know now.
So Wang Fuzhong's argument simply doesn't hold water. Of course, we don't know why Wang Fuzhong has such a big prejudice against Chinese medicine, but he is definitely not a person who thinks things over before speaking. If everyone only speaks according to their own emotions and doesn't talk about actual evidence, it's not an animal barking, which is ridiculous.