Some interesting quotes by a pre-med student on a medical forum:
'My mother, who's now a neuroscientist, got her Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from a major Japanese university. Her thesis was the isolation of an anti-cancer compound from a natural remedy that had been in use for thousands of years. In Japan and China (not sure about Korea) there are actually a lot of scientists who basically take TCM remedies, test them on animal models to see if they work, and then isolate the active chemical ingredient to figure out the biochemical mechanism for the original remedy. My feeling is that if a TCM drug works really well on a rat with, say, hepatic cancer (what my mother worked with), you probably can't chalk it up to placebo effect'
And:
'I probably also don't need to remind you that there are aspects of western medicine that are also empirically derived. For example, many chemo regimens and drugs are used without knowledge of their mechanisms of action but only their efficacy in clinical trials. Many were also developed through high-throughput chemical screens of both synthetic and naturally-derived compounds in big pharma's chemical libraries. That's not much different from traditional medicines being used because they are good at what they do and discovered by centuries of testing stuff found in the natural environment - except the big pharmas do it much faster.
I believe in giving credit where it's due. If a traditional remedy has scientific basis or efficacy, then I will still call it traditional medicine because it was developed through traditional empirical observations using traditional methods and probably passed down through tradition.'