True, but modern "western"[1] medicine is not about the specific chemicals used, or even knowing how they exactly work at a chemical level, but the process for identifying what does and what does not work. It's an "evidence based" science with with experiments designed to counter known biases such as the placebo effect. Much of what we consider modern medicine was developed before we were entirely sure that atoms actually existed!

[1] It isn't actually western, because it's also used in the east, middle-east, south, both sides of every divide, etc... In the same sense, there is no "western chemistry" as an alternative to "eastern alchemy". There's "things that work" versus "things that make you feel slightly better because they're mild narcotics or stimulants... at best."

(I don't want to focus too much on Chinese herbal medicine, because I see the same cargo-culting non-scientific thinking in code development too. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen an n-tier SPA monstrosity developed for something that needed a tiny monolithic web app, but mumble-mumble-best-mumble-practices.)

"Western medicine" (which is exactly what it is called in China, to contrast with TCM) is shorthand for "practices invented in the west". That these methods chase universal truths, or are practiced world-wide, do not make them "non-west" in terms of origin.

The Chinese call the practice of truth seeking, in a more broader sense (outside of medicine) just "science".

"Western" medicine is also not merely the practice of seeking universal medical truth. It is also a collection of paradigms that have been developed in its long history. Like all paradigms, there are limits and drawbacks: phenomena that do not fit well. Truth seeking tends to be done on established paradigms rather than completely new ones.

The "western" prefix is helpful in contrasting it with TCM, which has a completely different paradigm. Many Chinese, myself included, have the experience that there are all sorts of ailments that are not meaningfully solved by "western" medicine practitioners, but are meaningfully solved by TCM practitioners.