What woo-woo nonsense will now be facilitated by YouTube? The case of TCM

Click to enlarge and clarify

I’m posting this again, after having talked about it the other day, because I realised that my flabber was well and truly gasted, by what these senior Health officials here in Hong Kong are saying about the use of Traditional Chinese Medicine. By the fact it was carried on the front page of our “paper of record”, the South China Morning Post, the largest-selling English language paper in Asia. By having our top health experts propagating this woo-woo. For we must be clear: it is woo-woo, with no valid medical research, double-blind control tested showing any benefits. The fact that millions in China take TCM, and believe they benefit, is nothing more than the placebo effect. (also to be clear: the placebo effect is real. But to the extent that it does help, sometimes, it’s because of the mind of the patient, not the effect of the medicine).

At first, I thought: “If I posted this woo-woo on YouTube, they would cancel me for posting misinformation”.

Then I realised something weirder, after going to the YouTube Covid-19 medical misinformation policy: which spells out what you’re allowed to say, and what you’re not allowed to say on YouTube:

YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19... [the rest...]

So, here’s the thing. If our LHA, which in Hong Kong is the Centre for Public Health, posts something about Covid, I have to make sure that I don’t contract them. Our Centre for Health Protection have endorsed the use of TCM to prevent and treat Covid. If I challenge that, I’m the one that gets cancelled!

If I say that TCM is unscientific, that the “studies” they have done are bogus, because they have no control groups, if I say they are propagating dangerous nonsense, I will be the one cancelled because I “contradict the local health authorities”. 

How’zat! Stumped!! Bowled out.

ADDED: I’ll pick out a few gems from the article above, the one on the front page of the SCMP:

“Hospital Authority chief executive Henry Fan called for ‘significant expansion’ of the role that TCM played in healthcare and greater collaboration between its practitioners and Western doctors”.

Comment: (1) Zero science showing TCM in healthcare is useful. And (2) When western medicine is used in conjunction with TCM,, who can say which one is effective? TCM pushers claim -- with no evidence -- that it’s TCM. 

“Professor Bean Zhaoxian... said 71 percent of the participants were diagnosed ... with Qi deficiency of lung and spleen and Qi and Yan deficiency...”. 

Comment: Oh, really!?  Woo woo writ large. 

“... researchers found that 36.5 per cent of [recovered patients] -- more than one in three -- reported improvements in ‘long Covid’...”.

Comment: would they have improved anyway? How do we know? We don’t. There were no control groups. And why not? Because “... it might have been harder to prevent those participants [in the Control Group] from knowing they were not receiving the treatment because the herbs could have a recognisable taste”. Oh, for heaven’s sake! And so we’re supposed to be ok, with that? It only heightens the nonsense of TCM that it is dosed out in literal herbs that still taste like herbs. 

To add insult to injury, we are told that increased numbers of  “experienced and reputable” TCM practitioners from China will be foisted on Hong Kong. 

This is such nonsense. It is also dangerous. And it’s embarrassing for a city that is supposed to be a modern science-based one. Shocking.