Chairman Mao

Most, if not virtually all, of what is now referred to as “traditional Chinese medicine” is quackery. I realize that it’s considered “intolerant” and not politically correct to say that in these days of “integrative medicine” departments infiltrating academic medical centers like so much kudzu enveloping a telephone pole, but I don’t care. I’m supposed to be impressed that the M.D. Anderson and Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers, among others, have lost their collective mind and now “integrate” prescientific nonsense along with their state-of-the-art cancer therapy? I don’t think so. I can be puzzled by it. I can be dismayed by it. I can even be enraged by the infiltration of woo into prestigious medical centers. I am not, however, impressed by it, at least not in the sense that I’m about to jump on the bandwagon and embrace pseudoscience, too. I will admit, however, to being impressed—but not in a good way—with the ability of clinical leaders at such institutions who really should know better to embrace pure pseudoscience, including acupuncture, tongue diagnosis, the balancing of hot, cold, damp, and the other things that TCM claims to balance, and the vitalism that is at the heart of TCM in the form of qi, the undetectably imaginary life “energy” whose flow is supposedly redirected to healing effect by acupuncture.

Particularly galling about the ascendency of TCM in the US is the myth that is swallowed whole by its advocates. That myth is the very history of TCM, whose true origins are unknown by all but a very few. Contrary to popular belief (particularly about acupuncture), those beliefs do not go back thousands of years into antiquity, when the ancient healing wisdom of the Chinese was supposedly first discovered. In actuality, very few people are aware that the single person most responsible for the current popularity of TCM was not some ancient Chinese healer but rather Chairman Mao Zedong. That’s why an article published by Alan Levinovitz in