BEIJING — “Stick out your tongue. Now give me your wrist.”
That’s how “Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)” practitioners begin to diagnose what ails you. It’s often followed by a prescription of foul-tasting herbs, to be taken daily, along with exhortations to consume or avoid certain “hot” or “cold” foods.
But after more than 2,000 years of practice, the question remains: Is there scientific evidence that traditional Chinese medicine actually works? A doctor at one of Beijing’s top hospitals is challenging these time-honored methods with a modern proposal: cash prizes for proof.
Dr. Ning Fanggang is offering 100,000 renminbi ($16,300) to anyone who resolves the common claim that traditional practitioners can tell if a woman is pregnant just by taking her pulse. “If [someone is] successful, I will never state that Traditional Chinese Medicine is a fake science,” Ning promised. The 38-year-old is chief surgeon at Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, which specializes in burn victims, and is also one of the best-known doctors on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.
His challenge calls for readings of 80-percent accuracy, using the pulse method alone. Critics complain that isolating the wrist from the rest of the system undermines the validity of a diagnosis, and thus the challenge.
So far, only one person has taken Ning up — but he appears to be backing out.
Another doctor from Chengdu, Lu Jilai, author of the “Chinese Encyclopedia of Losing Weight and Body Building” and “Traditional Medicine Trinity Theories,” boasted that he could even
