Following an agreement with the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the University of Malta now has a Centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine. The centre, run by Prof. Charles Savona Ventura, will run a Masters course in things like moxibustion. That’s the practice of burning dried mugworth on a patient’s skin. As you do.

I happen to be a member of the academic staff at the University (of Malta, not Shanghai). Because I wish the institution well and because I would like to see it uphold its standards, I object to this new centre and its courses. I hope that at least some of my colleagues will be encouraged to join the cause.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a kind of umbrella term for a large number of beliefs and therapeutic practices, some of which go back millennia. I’m not about to rubbish those beliefs and practices.

On the contrary, I think they offer a fascinating insight into cultural understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment.

What TCM isn’t is a science. I take science to mean a system of knowledge based on the evidence of the senses (empirical knowledge, in other words). For that evidence to qualify as scientific, it must first be shown to stand up to experimental testing.

That is the key difference between my beliefs about what causes headaches, or why there are craters on the moon, and scientific knowledge of the same.

TCM has plenty of beliefs about what causes headaches and a million other ailments, and how to cure them. None of these has ever been shown to stand up to experimental testing.

Does that therefore mean that there is no room for TCM at a serious university?

Not necessarily. Among the various bits of kitsch in my study I have a Navajo sand painting. As the writing on the tin suggests, it is a picture made up of coloured sand produced by the Navajo people of the American southwest. Traditionally, sand paintings were used as part of healing rituals which also involved special invocations to the spirits sung by medicine men.

I’ve often used my sand painting as a prop in my work. That’s because the healing rituals of the American southwest, and of anywhere else, are very much legitimate territory for certain University courses. That said, I’ve never told my students that chanting over a sand painting would cure, or help cure, their headaches, nor do I intend to do so. If I did, I’d deserve to lose my job.

The point is that while TCM, or Navajo healing rituals, can be usefully discussed at University as systems of knowledge, just as literature or ancient Greek cosmology are, they cannot be taught as a science that involves empirical notions of cause and effect.

Whether or not some of the practices of TCM might work is an irrelevant question entirely. It is well known that prayer, for example, can help believers deal with pain – that it can effectively alleviate pain, in other words. But while doctors would be well advised to be sensitive to that equation in their daily routines, it would be strange to teach medical students prayer techniques as some kind of cause-effect routine.

I’ve never told my students that chanting over a sand painting would cure, or help cure, their headaches, nor do I intend to do so. If I did, I’d deserve to lose my job

Nor do I care that the University of Malta seems to be urging that TCM be used to supplement, rather than replace, mainstream medicine. Useless supplements are just that. They simply separate fools from their money, and in this case the list of fools includes the taxpayer.

In other words, my problem is not with TCM generally. Rather, it is with structures that allow, indeed encourage, TCM to masquerade as a science. The Centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine looks set to be a prime example of that travesty.

I know I’m right, because we have it from the horse’s (or is it a unicorn?) mouth. Malta Today ran an interview with Savona Ventura the other day. Assuming (safely, in this case) that he was accurately reported, I found some of the things he said positively astonishing.

First, that the centre was set up ‘to cater for a rising global and local demand for traditional Chinese medication’. This strikes me as academic mercantilism. The first calling of a University should not be global or domestic demand, but rather a scholarly loyalty to intellectual rigour.

Second, that students will be tutored in techniques like moxibustion. In quackery, in other words – and I really don’t care if that quackery goes back two or ten thousand years. There is zilch scientific evidence that burning mugworth has any tangible physiological effects whatsoever.

It follows that if the medics at the centre insist, I’d recommend using cabbage at least, by way of preserving wild plant stocks.

Third, that “diseases are a result of disharmony between the body and the environment”. Savona Ventura is a medical specialist. He knows far better than I do that this is rubbish. While some conditions are indeed the result of environmental factors, many more aren’t. The premise, in other words, is completely unscientific.

Fourth, I quote: “Exposing medical professionals to TCM could also encourage research into whether the millennia-old therapy has a physiological basis or simply works as a placebo... until that time though, the professor encourages TCM as a supplementary treatment for pain relief”.

This is staggering, for three reasons. First, because it confirms that there is no evidence for the physiological effects of TCM. Second, because a true scientist should have no respect whatsoever for the longevity of information (may I suggest respect for its scientific validity instead?)

Third, because to say that a treatment should be used cautiously until evidence for its usefulness is found, is a perversion of scientific thinking.

Readers might ask why my insistence on scientific rigour.

The reason is that the centre is run by a medical specialist, is linked to practices in place at the government hospital, and calls itself a type of medical schooling at University. Thus my argument for a travesty.

The good news is that the centre and its director do not really sum up the state of the art. Take Prof. Alex Felice, a specialist in physiology and biochemistry at the University of Malta. One of Felice’s achievements is the Science in the City festival.

The festival, which is held every autumn and is sponsored by the University, aims to introduce children and people generally to the scientific way of thinking. It’s an excellent event that gets better every year. Painful contradiction aside, it also reminds me that University hasn’t abandoned its commitment to intellectual rigour.

I said earlier that if I told students that chanting over sand paintings could cure their headaches, I’d deserve to lose my job. That leaves the centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine with one monumental headache. And a stack of unburned mugworth.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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