Can traditional Chinese doctors really tell if you’re pregnant by touching your wrists?

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 determine the date of his patients’ next menstrual cycle. Liu flunked his own blindfold test, complaining he needed “the use of all senses.”

On Weibo, where he’s known as Ah Bao (“Baby”), Ning posts criticism of medical practices, including TCM, to his 140,000 or so followers. Such is their enthusiasm that Ning’s original reward, a mere 50,000 renminbi ($8,150), was quickly doubled by supporters.

But to thousands of practitioners and millions of adherents, Chinese medicine is not a spectator sport. It is a tradition dating back thousands of years, incorporating a vast corpus of literature, pharmacopeia and philosophy, along with a broad range of practices, including acupuncture and reflexology. It’s also a business worth around $80 billion a year.

The State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine — more a Big Herbal-style lobbying group than an industry watchdog — has responded to Ning's challenge solemnly, noting that Chinese and Western medicine are different but equal, complementing each other to provide “the best possible benefit.” The spokesperson labeled the contest meaningless, with anyone accepting it “lacking comprehension.”

Beijing University of Chinese Medicine’s Yang Zhen had been the first to condemn the challenge, telling China Daily that Ning had harmed TCM’s reputation as a science.

Chinese medicine can be a minefield for officials, where “science” is wielded as a progressive term. To the students and intellectuals of the 1910s progressive New Culture Movement, China’s backward culture was typified by values placed on its traditional medicine. In his preface to "Call to Arms," Lu Xun wrote that it was “simply a lie, purposely or not.” But even today, Lu — a brilliant satirist who studied medicine in Japan — is considered controversial.

As educated liberals began celebrating Western science, the old methods survived both the Republic of China (1911-49) and the iconoclastic Cultural Revolution. This was partly due to medicine’s entrenched role within society. Practitioners were inheritors of secrets handed down through generations; while Mao waged civil war, “barefoot doctors” provided comfort and assistance when no alternative existed.

During imperial times, traditional medicine had come to include astrology, divination and incantation. In the post-Mao era, nationalists celebrated TCM as a unique Chinese philosophy, stripped of feudal practices, and a bulwark against foreign imperialist thinking.

Ironically, it was this logic that allowed many of these egregious elements to creep back in, fueled by lingering superstition and wholesale greed. “The government policies in recent years have mostly treated TCM as placebo,” says Xu Yunyun, a gynecologist with 227,000 followers on Weibo. “While the public craze has exaggerated its effects but made it less scientific.”

This has, in turn, fostered a minor industry debunking TCM fraud.

Traditional medicine fraud

One practitioner, Zhang Wuben, was infamous for his cure-all diet of mung beans. He hawked DVDs, books and $45-a-minute consultations. When bean prices shot up in 2010, Zhang’s medical qualifications were exposed as fake.

Celebrity Taoist “master” Wang Lin told clients — such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li and China’s richest man Jack Man — he had cured cancer and could produce “snakes from thin air” using qigong, a spiritualist practice with TCM techniques including breathing exercises and meditation. Amid accusations of medical fraud, tax evasion and consorting with gangsters and corrupt officials, Wang fled to Hong Kong in 2013.

Yang Zhen — the first to sign up for Ning’s pregnancy challenge — was also the first to begin throwing shade. The sample size of 32 women, Yang claimed, meant the results would “lack persuasiveness.” Just as persuasive was Yang’s excuse that hospital regulations might forbid him from “practicing” outside. 

Xu, the gynecologist, who describes himself as a supporter of TCM’s physiotherapy benefits, says the best way to test its effectiveness is “random double-blind tests, which is the same for any medical theories.”

Unfortunately, most TCM doctors prefer using "scientific" methods to confirm bias, rather than prove or challenge their assumptions. As a review of 72 such trials by the Cochrane Collaboration concluded in 2009, there was simply “not enough good quality trial evidence to make any conclusion about the efficacy of the evaluated treatment[s] … due specifically to the poor methodology and heterogeneity of the studies reviewed.”

Currently, organizers say Yang has pulled out of the challenge — he’s denied this — and they are waiting for other qualified TCM practitioners to take his place. If none do by the end of next week, the contest will be canceled.

The debate on TCM’s limitations, however, will go on. “The fact is, legitimate doctors prefer — and rely on — modern scientific examination methods,” says Xu. “Only ‘legends’ and television would try to make the pulse diagnosis seem magical.”