> NICE was recommending Beating the blues because they have some evidence of efficacy for it.

You know how 'traditional chinese medicine' came about? Mao needed to invent something to give to the peasants that wasn't expensive as real health care.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

This is obviously refuted by the fact that Chinese ex-pats associated with the KMT in Taiwan (i.e. the very people who fled Mao) have been practicing "traditional Chinese Medicine" to varying degrees since their pre-Mao childhoods. To believe that Slate article is to believe that somehow Chinese herb shops appeared in Taiwan in response to propaganda from either Mao or the US Government and that these peoples' childhood memories were subsequently "revised". That makes absolutely no sense.

Edit: Perhaps what you mean is that the Western notion of Chinese medicine as a viable alternative to Western medicine was invented by Mao? That might have some shred of truth. But it's a very narrowly defined truth, and a very semantic one.

Revision of distant childhood memories is very common. We all trust our memories too much, especially in a legal context. Childhood memories are just as, if not more, malleable.

It's more useful to think of memories as Michael Bay's version of "Pearl harbor".

Yes. But it's one thing to question whether the chicken soup your mother made used canned or homemade stock. It's quite another to question whether she ever actually made chicken soup when you were sick, and then repeat that for the millions of other people who remember having chicken soup.

Really off topic, and I'm probably being pedantic, but I don't see the conclusion that you've given from what's presented in the article, re: blaming Mao for the modern ideology that perpetuates chinese medicine. I mean, it's true that a dialectical approach would probably lead to the adoption of most ideologically useful form of medicine, but a distinct separation of 'chinese medicine' and 'western medicine' seems directly antithetical to what Mao was saying... the fact that Mao wanted to address rural/traditional medicine and integrate into a medical tradition doesn't imply that Mao is the reason for orientalism and mysticism with regard to that medicine, especially since those things obviously far predate Mao.

You can read the evidence that NICE has.