The Chinese culture is very superstitious. It is taken for granted that there are ghosts, goblins, and spirits living in our midst.  This attitude has diminished slightly in modern times with the concerted effort of the Chinese government since the establishment of the Peoples Republic to “re-educate” the population to abandon some of the more obvious unscientific and irrational thinking.  But superstitions associated with numbers still persist.  Today, in the Chinese communities of very modern and technologically advanced metropolis in Asia such as Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore or in North America such as San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto, you will probably not see joysticks and incense burning at the entrance of businesses to ward off evil spirits, but real estate agents will attest to the fact that they cannot possibility sell a house with address “5358 4th Street” to a Chinese family.

The hang-up with numbers among Chinese is a direct result of the conjunction between a superstitious culture and a monosyllabic language.  Each word in the language has a monotonic sound and is represented in writing by a single character.  But then many different characters or words have the same sound so if you just hear one character or word pronounced, you cannot pin down the meaning.  In other words, homonyms are numerous in the language.  The equivalent in English would be words like “see” and “sea” or “break” and “brake” which when just sounded out cannot be properly identified unless they are put in a phrase or sentence.  Now, consider a language where every word has that problem.  It is therefore not surprising that most Chinese jokes are puns and play on rhyming words.

In addition to the monosyllabic nature of the spoken word, it is also tonal and inflection dependent, i.e. the same sound when uttered with rising or falling tone or inflection will have a different meaning.  Of the many dialects in China, the Cantonese dialect has the most possible tonal variation for the same sound – basically with the same sound, say it four different ways tonally, you get four different concepts (written out differently.) Some sounds have as many as 7 possible tones and inflections – while 3 or 4 are common.  Take the sound “ma.” When said with a flat tone, it means “mother,” from flat to low, it means “horse.”  When pronounced with a low to high inflection, it means, “to scold or chastise” and from low to a lower inflection it means “jute or hemp.”  [ok, find a native Cantonese speaker and ask him/her to sound out “ma” the different ways and challenge yourself to figure out the difference – it’s subtle.]

Understanding this linguistic aspect of the culture, one can appreciated why many Chinese superstitions are fantastic associations of words and phonetic play on words. The word for bat is “fook” which phonetically is the same as the word for “good luck” and the word for deer is “luk” which is a phonetically the same as the word for “promotion and career success” and is also phonetically identical to the number “6.”  So the tradition gift for a college graduate would be embroidery or posters with bat and deer motive and any gift sets of six of anything is good.  The word for “tangerine” is phonetically the same as the word for “gold” so during Chinese New Year feasts, we give each other tangerines. When we say “Here’s some tangerine for you” it is completely phonetically indistinguishable from saying “Here’s some gold for you.” Even though I grew up with this type of thinking, I cannot say how much of this is taken seriously or just fanciful word play. But when it comes to homonyms or words that just rhymes with numbers, it is taken as serious as the incest taboo!

Because of the difference in pronunciations of the numbers in different dialects, superstitions associated with numbers differ in different regions of China. But by far, in Southern China, where Cantonese is the predominant dialect, superstitions associated with Cantonese pronunciation of the numerals are numerous. This is also true of Chinese communities in all major cities in Southeast Asia, Canada and the U.S. where Cantonese speakers are in the majority.  So, here are the homonyms and rhymes of the 9 digits when sounded out in Cantonese:

One – “yat” – means “certainty” when used in a sentence.
Two – “yee” – homonyms with word for easy.
Three – “sarm” – rhymes with “sarn” – life, to give birth.
Four – “say” – rhymes with “saay” – to die, death.
Five – “ng” – homonym with word for not; prefix to negate any verb or make opposite any adjective like “un-“ in English.
Six – “luk” – homonym with word for career success, promotion. Also homonym with word for deer.
Seven – “chut” – the number is associated with death!
Eight  – “bard” – rhymes with “fard” – to prosper and accumulate wealth.
Nine – “gauw” – rhymes with “gow”- enough or sufficient.  Also homonym with word for dog.
Ten – “sup” – not a problem in Cantonese but in pronounce in Mandarin, it’s a homonym with word for death and rhymes with “four.”

So now we can have some fun with numbers.  You certainly don’t want to live on 4th street (“death” street?) and of course 2nd street is always good (“easy” street.)  Combine the digits and you can really max out with good fortune living in house no. 368 on 2nd Street (“life, career success, and prosperity” on “easy” street.)  If you have to rent an office in a professional building, go for Suite 288 (“easy to prosper” and “prosper.”) and stay away from Suite 2424 (“easy death, easy death.”) Precede any good number with the digit 5 and things become problematic – so 58 is “no prosperity” and 53 is “no life” or worst yet “infertile.”  While 13 may be an unlucky number in the West, 14 to the Cantonese is “certain death.” Advice to the uninitiated: when in doubt, string on the 8’s – the more the merrier and you can’t go wrong whenever a number has lots of 8’s.

What you have to realize is that because rhythms and homonym are such an integral part of the spoken language, you cannot avoid thinking about “death” every time you say “four” or think “prosperity” whenever you say “eight.” It is then necessary to make sure that bad words don’t come out of your mouth if you can avoid it at all.  You avoid numbers like 4, 5 or 7 and go for 3’s and 8’s if you have a choice to select anything that has numbers.  If you live on 4th street, you cannot avoid giving directions to visitors on how to get to “death street.”  The problem compounds if you already have the predisposition to believe that ghosts and spirits surrounds you. Why tempt fate by saying “death”, “certain death”, “no life”, “no prosperity”, “enough career success” etc if you can avoid it at all.  When you give out your telephone number to a potential client, do you really want to say “die, die, die” if the last 3 digits of your telephone number is “444?” When I accompany my mom to the doctor, I cannot possibly tell her we are going up to Suite 414 (“death, certain death.”)

From my personal experience and observation, most of the Chinese population in the U.S. are fairly well educated and are a little less superstitious then their countrymen in the “old country.” However, that is not true of Chinese business owners.  They are a very superstitious lot when it comes to numerology which may influence their ability to make money – lots of money. There is no end to their quest for business addresses, telephone numbers and auto license plates with the correct lucky, good fortune, prosperity-inducing digits. Houses and business addresses with good, lucky numbers can fetch a higher selling or rental price if the buyer is Chinese. Stories abound in Asian business centers of business tycoons who paid over a million US dollars for lucky number license plates or telephone numbers.

So, here’s a couple of moneymaking ideas for you if you live in a community with lots of Chinese.   If you have a cell phone number or license plate with lots of 8’s, 3’s, or 6’s and no 5’s to negate all the good stuff, try auctioning it off – some Chinese business owner will buy it from you for sure.  You can be certain that all personalized license plates in California with lots of 8’s, 3’s and 6’s have been purchased by Chinese. If you work in auto sales, discount a $20,000 car to $18,888 for a Chinese propect and you’ll make the sale!  Now, the Real Estate Sale Agent of the Year Award should go to the agent who can sell a house with address No. 5358 on 4th Street to a Chinese family!  House number “no life/infertile, no prosperity” on “death” street is a no sale but to a diehard skeptic like me it may be a bargain.  Find me one.

Unchecked by the scientific method, the Taoist origin of TCM, which depends on intuition and common sense, spawned some ridiculous concepts, which can only be described as naive imagination. It is believed that eating frogs which live in cool ponds must have a cooling effect on the body, while eating a lung shaped plant could be good for people suffering with tuberculosis. The latter is taken seriously for the shapes of natural objects are not mere cosmic accidents and must therefore have some intrinsic medicinal value associated with the shape of the organs of our body. Walnuts look like our brain – so it must be good brain food. Lima beans and cashew nuts look like kidneys so they are good for guess what? The longan berry (Dimocarpus longana aka “dragon eye”),  which really looks like an eyeball when peeled, must be good for vision. The panacea elixir extraordinaire of TCM is the ginseng root which can allegedly strengthen the heart and nervous system and shore up mental and physical vitality, build up resistance to diseases and even cure cancer. How? Because it looks like a complete human! Look at any advertisement or packaging for ginseng root, it is always posed to look like a stick figure human drawn by every aspiring kindergarten Picasso.  Ginseng in Chinese is “ren xing” meaning “human heart.” With such a name and such a shape, how can you go wrong?

Many a Chinese schoolboy in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia can attest to how many stew pig brains he had been fed in preparation to take the SAT or the infamous Cambridge Overseas School Certificate “O” and “A”-level exams required for admissions to some of the most prestigious universities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. (How did you think a kid from Borneo got into MIT?) Every herbalist will have a good stock of deer sinews for their arthritic customers and ground up tiger bones for aspiring kung-fu masters. Go to any butcher shop in any Chinatown in the U.S. and you can buy, off the shelf, chicken and pig vagina which are made into soup to be consumed by women (presumably of reproductive age!) In every major city in China and Taiwan, you can find restaurants specializing in serving penises of every animal known to the Chinese. You can probably guess that they cater exclusive to male patrons. Who needs Viagra when you had tiger penis for dinner!

According to TCM, everything you consume, animal, vegetable or mineral have some medicine value attached to it and every Chinese growing up is supposed to know about it. The difference between mother/aunt/grandmother and a trained TCM herbalist is that the latter has a more encyclopedic knowledge about these properties and knows more exotic consumables; all of which will have the power to restore balance to your yin and yang and to make sure your Chi flow is unobstructed. Next time you are in any Chinatown, stop by an herbal store and marvel at the wall of small index-card size drawers, each containing a different medicine. Most of the contents are dehydrated plant parts (leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, seeds, roots) and fungi but there are also tiger bones, toad skin, sea-horse and seal penis just to name a few. Unfortunately this list of ingredients also includes many body parts of endangered species including rhinoceros horns, bear gall bladders, bear claws and tiger paws. Some ingredients are known to be toxic if the dosage is not dispensed without some precision like foxglove (digitalis) and ma-huang (ephedra). When the herbalist diagnoses your condition (and I use the word “diagnose” loosely) he will pick out a combination of herbs, nuts and dried organ parts to make up a potion. Sometimes he just picks a pinch or a handful from the drawers. Sometime, he may even have to weigh the ingredient – usually only the more expensive ingredients get weighed, not the ones that may have the most potency or side-effects if over-dosed! Then he wraps everything in white newsprint paper. (Cultural hint for barbarians doing business in China: white paper is only for wrapping medicine – never use white paper as gift warp – never!)  Then he will explain to you how to prepare the concoction when you get home – sometimes you have to boil them in water (for anywhere from just boiling for a few minutes to simmering for up to 4 or 5 hours.) Sometimes, a gold or copper coin is dropped into the boiling concoction if some metallic essence is called for to compliment the brew. Sometimes all the ingredients are put into the pot at the same time, sometimes different ingredients are added at different times.

Individual herbalists may give you different ingredients for the same condition or they may give you different preparation instructions for the same ingredients. I remembered very distinctly an incident when my father was quite ill with stomachache, high fever, and diarrhea. He could not hold down any food for a couple of days. His cousin heard about his problem and on the way to visit us, stopped by his favorite herbalist to bring my father some medication – yes, the patient need not be present as long as the symptoms can be described. Unbeknown to my mom that his cousin was coming over with medication, she too went to her own favorite herbalist, presumably described the same symptoms and came home with another version of a cure. While the herbs themselves were a little different, the instructions on how to prepare them were; how much water to use and when to take the extracted bitter tea was completely different. I remembered my mom and cousin comparing the open packages on the kitchen table and discussing the significance of the differences especially the preparation.  Rational thinking may have befallen the Chan household that day.  By the fourth day my father gave in to Western medicine and was immediately checked into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital of North Borneo to have his very inflamed appendix removed.

But what is a kid suppose to think about East verse West? A visit to a Western medicine doctor often ends with a painful shot in the arm or buttock. A painless visit to the Chinese herbalist is always followed by having to drink up a few cups of black vomit-inducing bitter brew when mom is done boiling it. Of course, it’s never fun to be sick. What I remember of my childhood visits to the Western doctors is the hypodermic needle (thicker and bigger in my memory that they probably really were) and my main memory of visits to the Chinese herbalists is the pulse reading. A visit to the herbal doctor always started with the obligatory pulse reading. The herbalist feels your pulse at your wrist with his index and middle fingers. Supposedly a well trained pulse reader will be able to tell a lot about your general state of health by knowing how well your blood is flowing just by feeling your pulse.  They claim that they can feel for any irregularity from which to make a diagnosis about the patient’s liver and kidney in addition to the heart. It’s as good as dowsing!

That the foundation of TCM is unscientific, irrational and not supported by any empirical evidence is obvious, but that does not, unfortunately, means that TCM will go the way of flat-earth geography or alchemy. It is a cherished belief and a source of pride for Chinese all over the over the world today. For the People’s Republic of China (PRC), TCM is a patriotic symbol, enshrined in their constitution, taught in universities and protected and promoted by government agencies at all levels, from the village governing council to the most inner sanctum of the Chinese Communists Party. Since the founding of the PRC, TCM is sacrosanct and next to criticizing party or politburo officials in public, dissing TCM is the sure way to provoke and incite the wrath of the State.

In October 2006 someone did dare to skewer the scared cow of TCM in China.  A professor at an obscure provincial university launched an online petition to seek removal of the special status of TCM from the Chinese Constitution and as the only officially recognized medical system in China. Professor Zhang Gongyao from Central South University in Hunan province quickly found himself the center of controversy for voicing quite mild and reasonable criticism of TCM. He basically appealed for some serious research to be done on TCM and to update some of TCM’s outdated concepts and views about the human body using scientific principles. For daring to question the ancient wisdom of his ancestors and the political expediency of the Communist Party, vitriolic condemnation from his countrymen and government was quick. He was cursed on websites and Chinese culture discussion forums on the Internet by Chinese all over the world and denounced as a traitor by the Chinese government. He was right on target in his criticism that: “TCM has no clear understanding of the human body, of the functions of medicines and their links to disease. It’s like a boat without a compass: it may reach the shore but it’s all up to luck.”

Professor Zhang should take heart that despite being given special status; TCM is losing its luster in the eyes of many Chinese at home and abroad. Even Chinese newspapers reported that today the number of TCM practitioners in China has decrease to a little more than a quarter of what it was from the beginning of the 20th century and the number of physicians in Western medicine practice has more than doubled in the same period. In the case of my immediate family, my father was sold on Western medicine after his bout with appendicitis and followed a year later when my then 12-year-old older brother was diagnosed with brain tumor by a British educated and London University trained Chinese neurologist. He endured a 4 hour open-skull operation followed by a 2-month stay in a severely ill children’s ward in a Hong Kong hospital run by the British government. That was 1962, before MRI, endoscope probes and modern electronic medical instrumentation. I guess the surgical scalpel makes a very convincing argument in favor of Western evident-based medicine.

Today in any Chinese communities throughout China and Asia, access to and acceptance of Western medicine is widespread. The attitude of most Chinese, even those who profess to believe in TCM, laud Western evidence-based medicine for its ability to make accurate diagnosis of the most complicated illness with even the most subtle symptoms.  Without access to blood chemistry and urine analysis, TCM diagnostic techniques for non-communicative patients like babies are confined to just looking at their skin tone and smelling their poop and urine. (Reader may recall the scene from the 1987 Academy Award-winning movie The Last Emperor with concerned court physicians smelling the emperor’s chamber pot.) They concede that TCM has nothing to offer for serious illness, infectious diseases, trauma victims, organ transplantation and cosmetic reconstructions. Many have delicately downgraded their support of TCM to the equivalent of taking daily vitamin supplements. They use TCM to tonify themselves by regular consumption of the right tonic herbal brew to keep themselves healthy and disease free. Many are like my parents after they have “seen the light” and would always take their kids to Western-medicine trained physicians whenever they were sick. However, they themselves took the occasional herbal tea when they felt the need to balance and regulate their bodies. But as much as they were sold on Western medicine, they found it very puzzling that a Western-medicine trained doctor could not do anything for cold or flu except to tell us to drink lots of fluid and go to bed whereas every TCM herbalist will swear up and down that they have the ultimate herbal brew to do the job!

My quarrel with TCM is that it is unscientific and the body of knowledge upon which it rests is outdated and flawed. We now have a very good understanding of the operation of our human body – not complete but fairly accurate – yet TCM still seeks to describe the anatomy and physiology of our body with unrevised knowledge from our scientifically ignorant past. It’s not just bad science, it’s not even science. TCM needs to be brought up to 21^st Century scientific standards – shed all the voodoo, put it to vigorous tests and evaluate the results. I too, subscribe to the truism not to throw the baby out with the bath water – but let’s find out if there is a baby in there!  When the ginseng root and the quintessential female herb dong-quai were studied scientifically for their alleged cancer-curing power, they were found not only to be ineffective but in fact encouraged the growth of some cancer cells. It is quite possible that TCM herbs may be effective for many illnesses and may have something to offer modern pharmacology, but the active ingredients present vary in concentration depending on the soil and climate conditions under which they are grown. This makes the dosage unreliable and even dangerous when prepared by primitive home brewing. Until a pharmacological process is applied to preparation of Chinese herbs in the form of extracting the active ingredients and calibrating dosage, herbal treatment cannot be admitted into the realm of 21st century medical “science.” Like Prof Zhang, I like to see a concerted effort made to study them scientifically and let the results speak for themselves. That’s how Western medicine has ascended to it position of respectability. Study, research and promote the chemistry and pharmacology of the herbs and relegate the magic and superstitions to folklore and religion.

The argument from antiquity in favor of TCM usually goes like this:  it’s been around N-thousand years (replace N with your favorite integer between 1 and 5) and so it must have worked well! The truth of the matter is that TCM has no scientific basis and has been developed over the years on a foundation of very flawed understanding of the human anatomy and physiology.  Historically, the pathetically low cure-rate of diseases plaguing the Chinese population with access only to TCM resulted in the evolution of a hyper-superstitious culture bent on seeing ghosts and goblins around every corner and behind every bush, too ready to take another life away.   The inefficacy of their medical treatments throughout history, in my opinion, is responsible for the Chinese culture’s obsession with superstitions associated with maintaining good health and longevity.  The list of superstitious do’s and don’ts are especially long when it came to childbirth, prenatal and postnatal care.  Please note that I am not talking about ancient history or even 100 years ago – I am talking about the persistence of these superstitions today in very modern Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and big modern cities in China.

To understand TCM, you do not need to understand chemistry, biology, anatomy or physiology because the foundation of TCM has nothing to do with them.  You need instead to understand Taoism and Confucianism, as these philosophies are the founding principles of TCM. I will expend some ink here to explain these two very powerful underlying influences on Chinese society which gave rise to their understanding of the human body and the attendant medical fallacies.

Taoism is a philosophical movement founded by Lao-Zhi .  In his canon, the “Tao I-Ching,” Lao-Zhi laid out what Chinese are taught as the “Tao” of life – translated properly as “the righteous way” of life.  Taoism asserts that because we humans are a part of nature, goodness and well-being comes from being in harmony with nature.  Nature was thought to be made up of five elements – water, fire, wood, metal (gold) and earth.  This led to the conclusion that we must have five organs and five orifices, each one associated with one of the five elements. The difference between living and non-living things in nature was thought to be in the presence of “vital energy flow” in living organisms and absent in non-living things.  This is “Chi” (or “Qi”) — which has been adopted by the New Age Movement as their ubiquitous pseudoscience jargon de jour.  Along with Chi, is the concept of maleness (strength, virility, bravery, intelligence and every sexist stereotype you can ascribe to men) and femaleness (gentility, compassion, intuition, nurturing and every sexist stereotype you can ascribe to women) which are enshrined in the principle of Ying and Yang. Every food, animal, plant, word, color, taste, and feel have varying degrees of Ying and Yang.

Taoism is the quest for harmony with the universe.  Life is good when you are in harmony with each other and with nature.  You are healthy when your Chi flows smoothly through your body and you consume food, do stuff, use words and think thoughts that will keep your Ying and Yang in balance.  Since everything ultimately comes from nature, we must all somehow be one with nature, animate and inanimate objects included.  From this cosmogony – and unencumbered by verification or falsification by any experimentation – other fantastic ideas about nature and how nature works spawned.  Taoism proposed many of the proto-scientific ideas found among early Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Epicurus, Pythagoras, and others. But while the West has long moved away from the five elements/five senses approach to understanding nature and pathology of illness, every classically trained TCM “doctor” still start out with the proposition that the kidney is water, liver is fire, stomach is wood, lungs are metal and heart is earth when diagnosing illness and dispensing herbal medication.  I will leave you to your imagination to associate our five orifices with the five elements! While there may be nothing wrong with adopting Taoism as a philosophy or religion, it was unmitigated disaster to use it to gain an understanding of the physical human body for medical purpose.

Why have the Chinese after thousands of years of civilization not developed the scientific method to examine and put to test all the “common sense” knowledge about nature they have been taught or acquired by intuition?  Blame it on the sage Kung-Zhi, anglicized as Confucius.  The teachings of Confucius saturated every aspect of the Chinese society but it is not a religion and barely a philosophy.  The teachings are basically a set of rules governing relationships and the “proper” conducts of every possible social intercourse.  Confucianism is concerned with the hierarchical relationships of emperors over subjects, masters over serfs, husbands over wives, parents over children, teachers over students … and the list goes on. Then there is the preference for symmetry over non-symmetry, intellectual work over manual labor, and common sense over logic. He promoted common sense and reasonableness as the hallmark of a scholar.  For Confucius, it is not enough that a proposition be “logically correct”; it must be in accord with “human nature.”  Between Taoism and Confucianism, all the necessary ingredients to incubate and foster critical thinking was “taught” out of the Chinese society.

The complexity of the human body and all its attendant diseases and ailments can neither be explored nor understood by mere intuition and common sense.  Advancement in medical science requires application of the scientific method and as we make discoveries we must have an avenue to replace past knowledge with more current ones even if we have to contradict our teachers.  When students cannot challenge inaccurate or flawed knowledge of the teachers, errors are passed on generations after generations and the quest for knowledge and understanding of nature is stifled. When scholars can only contemplate and make common sense guesses and did not roll up their sleeves to dig into the dirt to study earthworms or cut open dead bodies to study inner organs, wild speculation of the unseen part of nature resulted.  Common sense, intuition, reasonableness and the pursuit of harmony may be ideal for understanding humanity and settling human disputes but they are inadequate for determining the locations of our internal organs or understanding the life-cycle of earthworms.  Canonical knowledge from antiquity located the heart in the middle of the body (“symmetry”).  In the 1700’s, Jesuit missionaries first arrived in China bringing with them the latest anatomy books from Europe showing the heart to be on the left side of the chest cavity. Common sense led Chinese scholars to conclude that since Europeans look different (“inferior”) externally, they must also have defective placement of their internal organs, which they intuit gave rise to their different religion.  It was thought then that if the Jesuits succeeded in converting any Chinese to their religion, it must be because these converts have hearts on the left side like the Europeans and thus defective as Chinese.  The Chinese scholars of the day pitied the Jesuits for not knowing that they were only converting defective Chinese!  One can conclude that it must have been beneath the dignity of a scholar to hold his hand to the left side of his chest to feel for palpitation – that would be manual labor.

“But.. but.. but.. TCM does work sometimes..” I hear my detractors protest.  Well, yes it does – sometimes.  And here I am going to invoke the “it’s-been-around-N-thousand-years” defense.  TCM could possibly work sometimes (rarely) for the same reason that if you give a blind archer enough arrows and enough time (thousands of year?) it is not unreasonable to expect that he may hit a target or even a bulls-eye.  Would you trust your health and well being of yourself and your family to dumb luck and random chance?  Consider the fact that in its long history, and in spite of their professed love of children, the Chinese never developed a branch of medicine to take care of children.  When the prevailing unscientific common sense wisdom was that babies were just smaller version of regular people and cannot be that different in their medical needs there is no need for a specialty of pediatrics.  Thus terms for distinct periods of childhood development like “adolescent” and “puberty” are absent from traditional Chinese medical vocabulary.

Next week, I will continue in Part II to relate some personal experience I have with TCM while growing up and how TCM must be accompanied by a heavy dose of superstition to work properly.  That the foundation of TCM is utterly unscientific is obvious to those of us who grew up with it and later discover science and the scientific method.  In modern times some efforts have been made to subject many TCM herbs and modalities to vigorous testing for efficacy and side-effects. A lot of these efforts were undertaken by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in their quest to promote TCM along side Western evidence-base medicine.  I will also comment on some of these efforts and why they are so politically sensitive about the subject.  Of the thousands of herbs commonly prescribed by “modern” TCM herbalists, a few have been found to actually do something.  The blind archer may have grazed the target a few times!  Modalities like acupuncture to treat various ailments from back pain to diabetes or “medical Qi-Gong” to treat cancer all turned out to be placebo at best. But yet TCM is making some headway in the U.S., for unfortunately in an increasingly scientifically ignorant society, the paucity of research-grade evidence is not a barrier for acceptance by the consumers as long as there are enough personal anecdotes in the form of “satisfied customer” testimonies.