People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work because of trial and error.
Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may work.
But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over 6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it doesn't mean it can't work.
Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some arbitrary potion to be medicine for some arbitrary disease and the placebo effect, appeal to authority and the desperation of sick people did the rest of the work popularizing them. The ancient Chinese used the positions of the stars to help choose their medicines. This ineffectiveness is shown by the fact that the traditional recipe Tu found actually involved destroying the active ingredient by boiling it! Clearly the original authors didn't know if it worked or not, since it didn't but they still recommended it to patients anyway.
Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.
> People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct
Maybe we have different definitions of "unscientific". It doesn't mean the same as "works well".
> just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work.
No, that just means they are unscientific.
If we want people to stop treating science like magic, we need to stop conflating "effective", "natural", and "is consistent with scientific findings" with "scientific".
If your experiments are not reproducible, it's not scientific. If the experiments and observations don't deal with sufficiently precise measurements (no '3 pinches of this'), it's not scientific. If it can't be tested with prediction, experimentation, and observation, it's not scientific.
That's not to say it's wrong or that collective discovery isn't a thing. It's just not science. This is important because collective memory can be right, but it can be wrong. Folk medicine says things like "pregnant women should eat protein to have a boy" and "rhino horn cures diseases of the pancreas". We need a way to collectively vet these hypotheses. That's what the scientific method is for.
"People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work because of trial and error."
Some of these herbs might work, but I imaging it's all do to the Placebo Effect.
If uneducated people want to ingest herbs--I really don't care. The problem is these people are killing Tigers, Bears, Rhinos, etc. falsely believing they will be cured of their alignment.
These people need to be educated. I am really bothered when I see another animal killed out of absolute ignorance, and tradition.(an unexamined tradition is just a folk tale?)
A well done double blind study is beautiful. We can argue about standard deviations, etc, but the studies need to be done.
Herbs great! Just leave animals out of the mystical cures.
Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may work.
But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over 6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it doesn't mean it can't work.