[genman]

Why not apply scientific method to Traditional Chinese Medicine and use double blinded placebo controlled trials to test its validity? In the end also modern medicine is using exactly this method and can treat substances using the black box method.

[FooBarWidget]

They are doing that — in China, in Chinese papers. Not everything has been researched yet, but there's quite a lot of active research going on.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

This is already being done and in many cases the RCTs show that the TCM treatments are effective.

[soco]

There's a whole article about exactly this and it can be accessed by clicking the title of this page. And guess what it's saying.

[cdf]

The fundamental problem is TCM acknowledges individual differences that cannot be measured or even dont exist in the eyes of modern medicine, eg identical twins with different diets will have different responses to the same treatment, so going double blind will mean the results will be inconsistent.

[IAmBroom]

Ah, the old "if you try to test for results, the results won't show up" problem.

Ghosts and ESP suffer from the same issue.

[BigGreenJorts]

This is why sample size is important tho. With a large enough sample size, you can ignore differences in individuals bc the trend of the control will be smaller than the experiment (or not)