Note: Hazaa! Regarding my previous post, it turns out there was a power surge through the house which fried one of my two RAM slots. This meant that the motherboard, RAM and HDD were fine. A little investigation on the order of RAM insertion and so forth got my laptop back in working order, with half the RAM. Good enough for Steemit, AND this post was saved! I will still buy a new one, however, since this one has broken keys, charge socket, chassis, screw holes, mousepad and power button. And the whole system has now completely 'died' on me twice. We had a good run, pal.
This image will make a lot more sense futher down
Last week's episode of Chinese pseudoscience started going down the rabbit whole. Today we're going deeper. Let's go with pregnancy:
Miscarriage
Miscarriages are markedly common, occurring around 10-20% of all pregnancies, and the majority of miscarriages have no known cause. Some miscarriages can be worse than others, with 'threatened miscarriages' bringing about severe vaginal bleeding, for example.
We in the west use progesterone and human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) to help prevention, but the effects are not fully verified to this date, though there are correlations here and there. Basically, more research is needed.
Traditional Chinese Medicine to the rescue!
TCM claims all manners of things as you may know from the extensive omni-cures I've touted in previous weeks. None of those claims turn out to be remotely valid, but I felt it necessary to look into this one in particular since us arrogant westerners don't have a solution.
In a systematic review of TCM for miscarriages, a group of Chinese researchers start off their study with:
Chinese medicine is well accepted as the mainstream of medical care throughout East Asia with a history of 5,000 years
Well, there's a red flag. The 5,000 years trope is pretty mythical, with a written history that you could at best argue about 3,000 years, o 4,000 if you're being wishful. But it's no better than saying Africa's history goes back hundreds of thousands of years because humans also existed at that time.
Anyway. Red flag aside.
The introduction continues to introduce a whole range of TCM such as Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Tui na, Cupping(done), Die Da, Acupuncture (done and done), and Gua Sha. Clearly I have a lot of work ahead of me.
As I continued to read, I came across this:
...unlike mainstream Western Medicine, Chinese Medicine has a unique medical theory to understand miscarriage
Oh? pray tell!
The major causes of threatened miscarriage include “Kidney Deficiency,” “Qi Deficiency,” “Blood Deficiency,” “Blood Heat,” “External Injury,” and “Wei Jia”
Qi deficiency, huh? They then regretfully inform us that:
...the efficacy and safety claims of Chinese medicines still have no scientific proof.
Due to the lack of systematic reviews, these researchers took it upon themselves to get it done. In their meta analysis, they found 12,912 of TCM studies related to pregnancy. Almost all of these were found in Chinese-only databases such as CNKI and CIN, barely any in PubMed, Medline or other international sources, and close to 80% were written in Chinese only.
So let's review:
A group of Chinese researchers doing a systematic review of Chinese-published, Chinese-language only papers, first informing us that TCM has innate understanding, and Westerners are clueless. Hmm. I smell bias, but I can't be sure where it's coming from...me, or them? Well, they concluded that the efficacy of TCM for miscarriage:
...ranged from 75% to 100%. Among all the records, over 84.6% of the studies exceeded 90%, while 24.3% exceeded 95%...the top 10 Chinese medicines only had effective rates from 91.3% to 93.2%
ONLY 91-93%. Well it's no wonder China is so overpopulated, practically every child survives while the rest of the world has about a 20% chance of fetal death. It also might explain why 7 million babies, or close to 50% the live birth rate, are medically aborted. The historical database I got those statistics from has a 'fetal death' column which since the beginning of records, has been left completely blank, so I couldn't actually find any statistics on miscarriage rates in China, but we can now safely assume it's about 0%.
So what is it that TCM uses that is so damn effective at preventing miscarriage? According to many TCM doctors, the best go-to source is the Shou Tai Pill. It was kinda hard to find any actual information about this in English, but for a low, low price of $50 - after your bargain, $65 consultation fee - you can buy the Shou Tai Pills, in which you can find:
- Dodder seeds (40%)
- Loranthus (20%)
- Dipsaci root (20%)
- Donkey Skin Glue (20%) (seriously)
(Subject to change per individual consultation)
Well there you have it guys! The omni-cure for miscarriage is in the sticky skin of donkeys. A quick Google showed that the English euphemism is actually Donkey-hide gelatin, or ejiao(阿胶) which sounds much better. There's no secret misunderstanding here. It's the skin of donkey, soaked and stewed.
This is such an important TCM resource that:
...donkey prices in many places around the world began to rise sharply amid Chinese herbalism demands. Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal have banned donkey exports to China
Woah... what about the other ingredients? Well, dodder seeds come from a plant related to the morning glory. Loranthus is a parasitic plant that lives off woody trees. Dipsaci root is the root of a prickly plant called teasel. Well, I'm convinced.
Back to the study
When it follows up with limitations and difficulties I had some hope that they would poke holes in their own work. What I found was a huge paragraph summed up by this:
It is very difficult for foreigners to understand the Chinese Medicine.
With relief they continued:
Most of the selected trials have inadequate methodology quality... it would be greatly helpful to improve the quality of analysis if the authors were adequately trained....according to the international standard.
...all the comparisons in these clinical trials were made between Chinese medicines and other medicines, which were not the recommended and the most effective treatment for threatened miscarriage
In between that, they quickly slip in that such improvements might involve, I don't know, double-blind studies, placebo-control, randomization, actually noting critical information down like dosage, change of dosage and/or composition, duration, average days of the week of treatment, the number of successful pregnancies, follow-ups and so on. But hey, good enough, right?
Get to the point
Ok. The point is, bias in science is a real thing, and nowhere is that bias stronger than in China. It glows with neon light in any study I look into, screaming blatancy with their proud monologue platitudes in any given paper. I wondered why they are so keen to give Chinese medicine a 100% success rate at the sacrifice of international value, but this paper even answers this for me, kind of:
Since 1980, the number of published papers in China has grown almost 3,000%. This may just be related to increased funds and rapid development but regardless, we don't typically judge quality by number like that. It's determined by the number of citations, and this tells a different story. The US annihilated competition with about 30% of citations globally. China currently has about 4%.
Obviously there is the language barrier, but to me international competitiveness seems to be another culprit. Based on the numbers combined with the heavy biases and low quality research present in China, it looks a lot like scientists are just trying to push out as many papers as physically possible.
A Chinese doctor, Dr Cong Cao backs me up:
There are many millions of graduates but they are mandated to publish so the numbers are high...It will take many years for some of the research to catch up to Western standards.
He also points out that there is a cultural need to stop depending on western creations and do everything themselves. This can actually be reflected across numerous Chinese cultural facets, such as how individual movie directors churn out 20 movies a year on super low budgets in hope that statistically, one might become a hit (hence terrible Chinese movies).
The most important thing
DON'T resort to TCM in an attempt to rescue your child and increase hopes of a healthy birth. The fact is, miscarriages are far more common than we are led to believe. It can be as high as 2 in 10 pregnancies. And yet, it is still not fully understood. Follow established, safe medicine that are backed by empirical evidence, and follow expert advice about, I dunno, breathing, stretching and such. The bias of research around the world is a major concern and I can't even imagine how many deaths it has indirectly (or directly) caused by playing on innocent people's ignorance.
Sources: Human chorionic gonadotrophin hormone for preventing recurrent miscarriage | Systematic Review of Chinese Medicine for Miscarriage during Early Pregnancy | Shou Tai formula | Donkey Skin glue
Imaged Sources in references or CC0 Licensed