RE: Chinese Pseudoscience: The absurd 'understanding' of the human body
I see you are very wound up and I can understand you!
Great set of info you add here, I didn't get to know all the details of their pseudomedicine, but the more I read the harder is for me to actually believe that there are people that DO believe it.
Living there, can I ask you if this is only due to lack of education or is it also a psychological inheritance, kinda like religion? Is it transmitted from parents to children? Is it included in the things passed on as culture by the parents? Because it feels like more than just a lack of education for me!
They had time to polish it and mask the results, like the western healers did but it remained the same. Is there a sign of improvement, does it evolve or is it the same as generations before?
I don't want to burden you with questions, I can find some myself, what is harder for me is to get someone with roots in their culture to understand it..
I've answered a bunch of this in one of the way older episodes but there's a few culprits for its perpetuation, primarily political.
As touched lightly upon here, it was seen as hocus pocus nonsense by scholars literally thousands of years ago and banned for use, it was only when Mao Zedong came into power that it started to return because he had a huge population and not enough real doctors to treat them. To shut them up he told the country to turn to this ancient stuff - which he is quoted as not even believing it himself.
With the cultural revolution in play he didn't want any smart-arse getting in the way and questioning him, so books and and people with brains were burned and kidnapped (in whichever order) until nobody questioned it.
Now it simply perpetuates from a lack of proper education as the scientific community in China are determined, for political reasons, to replace western influence with home-grown influence, and to generally out-number publications from the west regardless of quality, honesty and reproducibility for the sake of national pride. So with the backing of millions of 'scientific' papers, who can doubt it anymore?
As a result, it's spreading internationally and the white middle class of the west are increasingly embracing it as an 'exotic' and 'natural' form of medicine which is, of course, much better than the corrupt poisons being produced by 'big pharma'.
What a fun time we live in, eh?
EDIT: I should also point out that we're still living in a time where villages are hours and hours away from any notable doctors at all, perhaps days, and so we still get rural folk conjuring up random home remedies, including Poo tea and Urine
Yes you have indeed said something of the political replacement of the western influence.
About Big Pharma, I know. Whenever I read something from you I start to think about what can we do to change this, and then I remember that my country is being run from the shadows by a convicted felon that hides behind a prime minister that can't say 10 words without misspelling at least one.
It is a fun time to live in, honestly :)