Traditional Fraudulent Medicine

Apologies for the sickening image but sometimes it's necessary to bring home the impact that certain belief systems have in the real-world. In this case the system in question is called "Traditional Chinese Medicine" or TCM, a set of beliefs and practices that claim to cure diseases but are mostly about simple placebo. It should be obvious to most intelligent (un-indoctrinated) people that consuming the bile from a bear does nothing but cause countless bears misery and early death. Many people claim that there is some scientific evidence that things like bear bile have useful chemical compounds in them, this is unlikely, but even if true, all of these compounds have long be manufactured artificially or have suitable non-harmful natural substitutes. Bears are not the only victims of TCM, tigers, rhinos, sea-horses, snakes and even rarer animals such as pangolins are killed and various bits of them ground up to make magic elixirs and potions that people are told make them more virile and other such nonsense. Sometimes natural sources do provide real medicines, it's worth noting that the main compound in Aspirin is found in the bark of the Willow but we no longer decimate a river-bank every time someone has a headache. We don't need to hang onto hundreds of bogus claims just because one or two proved useful when we isolated and extracted the active chemicals and figured out how to deliver an effective dose.

Recently the WHO (World Health Organisation) endorsed TCM as a set of medical practices, this is an outrage. The WHO is supposed to be devoted to improving the health and medical care of people around the world, but in this instance seems to have taken a big step back toward medieval times. The motivation (of course) is money, the TCM market is worth $50 billion and without the need to prove efficacy through exhaustive testing and rigorous double-blind clinical trials I expect the margins are irresistible to the unscrupulous. There is no good reason to use Chinese medicine, you may as well insert any name and the effect is the same, French medicine, Aboriginal medicine or even Boggy Bottom medicine! (it's in Hertfordshire) If something works it's simply called "Medicine", the vast majority of TCM doesn't work and therefore isn't medicine and shouldn't be sold to gullible people along with false claims; the term for this is "fraudulent medicine"..