Some time ago, I found some people on the Internet who have learned a little bit of modern science but do not understand Chinese medicine attacking Chinese medicine and linking Chinese medicine with witchcraft, and I immediately thought of a paragraph in the book “The Rise and Fall of Chiang Kai-shek’s Five Main Forces” and found these people both irritating and ridiculous. In the book, it is written that Liao Yaoxiang’s corps, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s five main forces, was defeated in the Battle of Liaoshen. Liao Yaoxiang became a prisoner of the People’s Liberation Army, and he was very angry and unconvinced: How could his elite division, which had experienced the war in India and Burma, be defeated at the hands of these “local eighth-wayers”? What’s so great about Lin Biao? I, Liao Yaoxiang, have studied abroad and fought many beautiful battles, what does Lin Biao have? Ten days later, General Liu Yalou, the chief of staff of the Northeast Field Army, hosted a banquet for the captured Kuomintang generals. Liu Yalou took the initiative to clink glasses with Liao Yaoxiang, who refused, “I don’t want to drink this wine. I just want to ask, what kind of war you communists are fighting? Neither know strategy, nor tactics, and fight indiscriminately! If you give me the opportunity, please tell General Lin Biao that we swing our troops around and fight again, try it?” Liu Yalou replied nonchalantly, “It’s not that we don’t understand strategy and tactics, it’s that you can’t read our strategy and tactics. If you want to fight, we will accompany you, but you won’t have this chance anymore.” Liao Yaoxiang was choked speechless for a moment. Half a second later, he grabbed the glass of wine on the table and flung it viciously toward the ground: “Witchcraft, witchcraft, the Communists are using witchcraft to fight the war!” …… Those who attack TCM are like Liao Yaoxiang, who only understands Western strategies and tactics, not those of TCM. Even when they see TCM curing diseases that Western medicine cannot cure, they either think it is by chance or that TCM uses witchcraft. Those who think that TCM is a pseudo-science do not think about why some TCM doctors always “happen” to cure diseases, while people who have never studied TCM can use Chinese medicine to cure diseases by chance? When I was a high school student with excellent grades in mathematics, science and chemistry, I worshiped Newton, Einstein and other Western scientists, but I never thought I would fail the entrance exam and study Chinese medicine. When I first learned Chinese medicine, my first impression of Chinese medicine was that it was not scientific. At that time, I thought that the doctrine of yin and yang was similar to dialectics, but the doctrine of the five elements was too far-fetched, circular, and justified in any way, and could not be falsified, so it was not a scientific thing. Many concepts in Chinese medicine are ambiguous, a concept has both narrow and broad meanings, a concept is sometimes described in several ways, and there is crossover between concepts. Yin and Yang and these TCM concepts form the cornerstone of TCM theory, which is indeed difficult to accept for people accustomed to rigorous Western mathematical and logical thinking and experimental research. However, the fact that TCM can cure diseases, especially those that cannot be cured by Western medicine, made me think deeply. When I was studying philosophy, I came across Hegel’s proposition that “existence is reason”, which should be understood as follows: everything that exists must have its own reason for existence, and the existence of TCM must also have its own reason for existence. The proposition of pragmatism philosophy is “usefulness is truth”, my positive understanding is “usefulness must contain truth”, Chinese medicine is very useful, it must contain truth, that is, it contains science. Those who think that TCM theory is pseudo-science mainly do not understand the core idea of TCM theory and the paradigm of diagnosing and treating diseases, are confused by the five elements of yin and yang, and scoff at the simple analogy of the unity of heaven and man. The doctrine of yin and yang is the simple dialectic that guides medicine in the general direction of grasping the essence of life and disease. The doctrine of yin and yang is not only a philosophical guide for TCM, it also goes deeper into specific TCM concepts. The doctrine of the five elements in TCM, the ancients firstly expressed that man is an organic whole and the organs are interdependent and inter-constrained; secondly, the doctrine of the five elements is used as a scaffold for constructing a Tibetan doctrine centered on the five organs; again, the doctrine of the five elements is used as a grid for accumulating and summarizing medical experience; finally, the doctrine of the five elements is used as a doctrinal tool in TCM (to which the author was fiercely battling a certain rate of griddle nai more than 20 years ago. Γ Most people have a very superficial understanding of the Five Elements doctrine, seeing only its far-fetched, mechanical and circular side. There are even fools, the meaning of the five elements only from the modern literal sense to understand, such as that “water” is our daily use of water, how can gold produce water? Thus to conclude that the five elements doctrine is absurd. What “gold gives birth to water” actually means is that a solid substance like metal will transform into a liquid state under certain conditions. Among the TCM practitioners, there are also those who overly believe in the doctrine of the five elements, who cannot properly understand the role of the doctrine of the five elements in TCM, and who use the doctrine of the five elements as a tool for reasoning and self-justification, and it is difficult for such people to progress clinically. We should not underestimate the wisdom of our ancestors. 2,000 years ago, due to the limitations of technology and the ethical constraints of Confucianism, they used the “black box theory”, which is roughly equivalent to the modern cybernetics, regardless of the details of the internal structure of the human body, and used only the input and output (symptoms and treatment response) to Regardless of the details of the internal structure of the human body, only from the input and output (symptoms and treatment response) to speculate the internal structure of the human body, to build a set of models ——- organs and meridians doctrine, this set of models and the real structure of the human body revealed by modern anatomy can be said to be “heterogeneous and homogeneous. Therefore, although the internal organs of Chinese medicine and Western medicine are basically the same in name, but the connotation is very different, such as the kidney in Chinese medicine, not only includes the anatomical kidney, but also includes part of the function of the genitourinary system, neuroendocrine system, the kidney deficiency in Chinese medicine does not necessarily indicate that there is a problem with the kidney function in Western medicine. This model of TCM is the result of repeated generalizations and summaries of TCM treatment experience with the help of classical philosophy. It has been continuously revised, developed, enriched and tested by successive generations of TCM practitioners, and thus is still effective in guiding clinical practice today. We must understand that the doctrine of internal organs and meridians in TCM is not a product of anatomy, it is a hypothesis and is purely for clinical treatment, so TCM emphasizes the consistency of theory, method, prescription and medicine. Since TCM is not like Western medicine, which is the product of empirical evidence and experiments, and since classical philosophy permeates specific medical theories, the ambiguity and ambiguity of TCM concepts are inevitable, thus TCM has various schools of thought, but the complexity of the human body does not prevent “different songs” and “the same work The complexity of the human body does not prevent the “same function” from being “different”. Those who attack TCM theory as pseudoscience only see the ambiguity and ambiguity of the concept of TCM and think that the Five Elements theory is the core of TCM theory, not knowing that TCM theory is a unique paradigm of healing wrapped in a philosophical veneer. Arguments about the scientific nature of TCM erupt for a while, and the underlying reason is that —- TCM theory is the real science that looks like pseudoscience!