Chinese-Western Integration Is Not the Direction of Chinese Medicine's Development
How should Chinese medicine develop? By its own inner disciplinary character, or by borrowing outside methods and means to remake it — that is, by Chinese-Western integration and TCM modernization? Since Western medicine entered China, this question has vexed the TCM field. TCM has weathered storm and stress through a hundred years; bitterness and toil are the shared experience of several generations. What is the outcome? The Modern Education News of September 21, September 28, and October 19, 2001 published articles titled "In a Hundred Years, Will There Still Be Chinese Medicine?", "Where Is the Root of the Sickness of Chinese Medicine?", and "Is Chinese Medicine Still Treatable by Medicine?" — and gave us a clear answer.
By the 21st century — looking back — many TCM elders who waved the banner and shouted for TCM's development by its own character have passed on without seeing their wish realized; how many are still here to shout? If Shi Jinmo's slogan of the 1920s — TCM modernization, Chinese medicine industrialization — is called visionary, then the financial, material, and human investment of the first fifty years of the People's Republic in Chinese-Western integration is forceful proof of that slogan. But great investment has brought no matching return; on the contrary, the development of the TCM discipline has slipped into no successors of competence, no continued technique, even no successors at all — a tragic state. Despite the surface bustle and flourishing, the harsh fact is before us.
Although Chinese-Western Integrated Medicine has been made a national second-level discipline with over 50,000 members in the All-China Society of Chinese-Western Integrated Medicine, we still cannot accurately define what it is. In this concept-vague picture, under the good wish for TCM modernization, in the follow-the-crowd style — how many non-members are also engaged in this glorious mission? If Chinese-Western integrated research is a valid path of exploration for a new Chinese medicine and pharmacy, then a society of 50,000 members should be quite enough; there is no need for a thoroughgoing revolution across the whole TCM field. But from the earliest TCM-college curricula set by the State to today's Law on Practicing TCM Physicians, Shi Jinmo's saying — "Chinese medicine's millennia of experience must combine with Western medicine to penetrate its truth" — runs through everything: without Western medicine, TCM cannot stand independent. Where is the truth? Of the various ranks of TCM-pharmacy talent trained over the fifty years since 1949 — especially the higher-level (high-degree) talent of the last decade — those who truly master TCM theory and can use it skillfully in clinic to relieve patients are phoenix-feathers and unicorn-horns.
To those who promote TCM modernization, TCM lacks standardization and normalization; the first thing is to make it standard and normal. One important means is the so-called combination of disease-discernment and pattern-discernment — using Western disease-names to regulate TCM patterns, a typical practice of Chinese-Western integration. Under this drive, TCM's pattern-discernment treatment system is fully abandoned and replaced by Western diagnosis + Chinese-drug treatment; from this came patent medicines such as Bronchitis Pills, Hypertension Pills, and Rhinitis Tablets named by Western disease-names. If such an outcome is called TCM progress and development, which truly clinical TCM practitioner can use these patent medicines properly?
We must acknowledge that Beijing's Four Great Famed Physicians all had fine master-pupil heritage and high TCM attainment, and never gave up TCM's own system and strength. Facing the shock of Western medicine, more or less they held that TCM might learn from Western medicine and proposed Chinese-Western medical integration as an experiment — which is fair and indeed should…
(Source text continues in the original on cuiyueli.com; the cuiyueli.com source appears truncated mid-sentence at this point.)