TCM

Traditional Chinese Medicine makes up about thirty percent of China’s medical economy. Apparently not a single TCM herb had ever been shown in a clinical trial to be the best medicine for treating any condition. The only clear “best available medicine” that is derived from TCM is the pharmaceutically-purified compound class of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) for malaria. Everything else has, at best, adjunct benefits or is simply a placebo.

This is not a failure of science so much as a signature of a culture that never had its Enlightenment. Rationalism, falsifiability, and sceptical inquiry never became embedded. As a result, TCM is protected as cultural heritage, so it survives by decree and habit, rather than due to evidence.

In China, the machinery of science runs at full speed for vaccines, semiconductor fabrication and other sectors, but it is solely a tool applied where useful. They use science but they do not create it

In China’s culture, incumbency, fluency and authority are taken as proof of intelligence. Without deep norms of critique or falsifiability, an LLM already meets the bar for “general intelligence,” reflecting the local human standard of intelligence; one that leads to one-third of its medical budget being expended on products that have no proven efficacy.