I Can Talk to the Internal Organs-Chapter 40 - 35: Why Is Traditional Chinese Medicine So Slow? [2-in-1]
Can you accept this?
You have no choice but to accept it!!
Hence, when TCM wins, all it gains is a chance to barely survive. Is that laughable?
But this is history!
It can be said that in that painful period of history, people, in order to awaken and change the fate of the Huaxia nation, shattered many traditional things, and TCM was naturally not spared.
There is no right or wrong, only regret.
However, the fact that TCM has managed to linger on in such a difficult environment until today is enough to prove that it is not worthless.
If it were truly ineffective, it would have perished completely over a hundred years ago.
How could it be possible to still have supporters and critics of TCM online today?
Of course, TCM’s liberation from hardship is also owed to one person. It was he who started the barefoot doctor craze, and he who brought TCM to its historical peak.
During that period, the scale of TCM practitioners reached as many as 500,000, scattered across the entire country. Even in some remote valleys, these people’s legacy remained.
Lu Jiu’s great-grandfather was one of those barefoot doctors!
However, with the development of the times, when medical resources began to centralize, standardize, and modernize, especially with the introduction of the practicing physician certificate, the scale of TCM practitioners began to drastically decrease. It is said that in just a decade, it rendered twenty to thirty thousand TCM practitioners unable to practice.
No other reason, many TCM practitioners learned classical medical literature, but the examinations for the practicing physician certificate were in simplified characters. Furthermore, some who studied TCM were illiterate; their medical knowledge was passed down orally, able to speak but not write, let alone recognize words.
Moreover, for many diseases, TCM does not have a single solution. A single illness might result in different prescriptions from different doctors, yet all could cure the patient. This created the problem that examination answers could not be standardized, but exams required correct answers, and the examiners didn’t have the time to verify each answer individually.
Under such difficulties, naturally, many veteran TCM doctors couldn’t pass the exams and thus could not obtain the qualification to practice.
Those decades can be considered another dark period for TCM.
As an economic society arrived, the advantages of Western medicine were highlighted, and TCM was even less of a competitor. However, there was one school that adapted well to societal development.
Yes, the Warm Disease School was revived!
Because the public had already developed a long-term mindset towards taking medication, and nearly a century of disease propaganda had brainwashed them successfully. Since most diseases couldn’t be completely cured anyway, it didn’t seem to be an issue for TCM to prescribe treatments that lasted one to two years, right?
Moreover, in the field of warm diseases, my medicine is effective, albeit slowly. As long as you don’t mind the cost, I can let you keep taking it.
As a result, the notion of slow doctors was completely imprinted in people’s minds.
Since then, whenever TCM is mentioned, it’s met with, "Oh, it seems to be okay for conditioning the body, but it’s slower, not as fast as Western medicine."
Some patients with complex symptoms seek TCM, only to result in poor outcomes, leading them to curse TCM as useless and trash.
In fact, the theory of the Warm Disease School is excellent, but it’s just a supplement to TCM theory. What TCM practitioners truly need to master are classical formulas, which encompass all diagnoses and treatments. Whatever your symptoms may be, I’ll use appropriate medicine, whether it’s to support Yang or nourish Yin, the goal is concise prescriptions that provide immediate results, where the medicine eliminates the illness.
It’s not about rigidly adhering to one theoretical school and applying its theory to all diseases—that would be putting the cart before the horse.
Today, more and more TCM practitioners like Lu Jiu are studying classical formulas, and many big names in TCM are making every effort to promote them. However, TCM’s fate has never been in the hands of TCM practitioners themselves, nor the common people!
Its decline or prosperity hinges on whether someone wishes to emulate the old man who moved mountains, striving to dismantle this colossal mountain of healthcare...
