TCM should have cultural confidence

The doctors of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Australia will be eligible for registration since July this year, which means these TCM doctors have finally obtained a legitimate medical practice and bid farewell to the era of illegal medical practice. It is the first time for the TCM doctors to be formally recognized in a developed country.

Due to the cultural differences between the East and the West, the TCM had long been rejected by the mainstream medicine. Coupled with biased public opinion, it is imaginable that how hard the TCM was to obtain legal recognition and protection in Australia.

The key for the TCM to be recognized in developed countries is that its curative effect is recognized by patients. The data shows that the TCM and acupuncture clinics of Australia receive about 2.8 million patients every year, 80 percent of which is the mainstream social groups speaking English. The industry-wide annual turnover reaches over 100 million Australian dollars. In the entire world, the TCM has been applied in 162 countries and regions and 4 billion people use the herbal medicine. According to statistics, 70 percent of Chinese medicine practitioners abroad are foreigners and 70 percent of patients are also foreigners.

It cannot be denied that most Westerners are skeptical of TCM and many hold a completely negative attitude. Facing the internationalization and foreign culture, it is necessary for the TCM to make appropriate adaptations. However, we should not remold the TCM with the standard of Western medicine to obtain the recognition of the West. The TCM will lose the value of survival without traditional Chinese culture and characteristics. Therefore, the TCM must not be "de-Sinicized."

The TCM is the gem of ancient Chinese science and is also the key to open the treasure house of Chinese civilization. It is normal for the Westerners to have a prejudice against the TCM. However, it is puzzling that some people hold a negative attitude toward Chinese medicine. They believe that Western medicine is a science but Chinese medicine is not. They are not willing to see and even deny the development and progress of the internationalization of Chinese medicine. Those denying or opposing Chinese medicine lack of cultural confidence and always think that the Chinese medicine is not as good as Western medicine.

It has something to do with China's backward and miserable modern history that these people do not have self-confidence in the traditional Chinese medicine. While looking at the world, some elite intellectuals of China lost their self-confidences and unconsciously marginalized the traditional Chinese medicine, like what a professor from the Peking University Chen Pingyuan said, "In the comparative analysis of Chinese and Western cultures, many irrational emotional factors are added in easily. It is either 'East' or 'West' and therefore it is hard to find a proper position for the traditional Chinese medicine in the conflict between the two cultures."

The traditional Chinese medicine's declining history of more than 100 years has made some people have a prejudice or misunderstanding that the traditional Chinese medicine is "unscientific."

For the traditional Chinese medicine, the most important thing is to have the cultural self-confidence but not to wait for recognition of the West. The Chinese architect Wang Shu who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize known as "the Noble Prize of the architectural realm" said, "The place with more self-confidence needs the landmark less because he lives there." In order to foster a high cultural self-confidence, the cultural self-abasement must be eliminated first. If workers of the traditional Chinese medicine do not believe in it, dare not use traditional Chinese medicines to treat people or use them baselessly or blindly, then who else will trust it and what kind of future will it have?

The traditional Chinese medicine is rooted in the soil of the traditional Chinese culture and has its unique advantages and values. Only if we adhere to the principle of "inheriting it without sticking to old methods and developing it without losing its spirit" and make more people experience the true effect of the traditional medicine can we make the public believe in it. Without the cultural self-confidence, it is hard for the traditional Chinese medicine to "Go Global."