The TCM "national quintessence" cannot be separated from the law

Not long ago, some media disclosed that there are at least 150,000 folk TCM practitioners in the country who have been "illegal" for a long time. Protecting and improving the living environment of folk TCM practitioners is more urgent and important than excavating and sorting out folk medical resources, so that the legal practice of folk TCM practitioners should be solved from the source.

Not long ago, Tu Youyou's winning the Nobel Prize set off a wave of "TCM popularity", and "TCM" has become a hot topic among experts, scholars and even ordinary people all over the world. However, it is extremely surprising that there are 150,000 folk TCM practitioners who are "practicing medicine illegally" and do not have a medical license at all. The disorders of TCM, known as the "national quintessence", can be seen.

According to media reports, these 150,000 folk TCM practitioners are in a useful and beneficial but "illegal" state. If the reason is investigated, it is that the threshold set by the practicing doctors law restricts the development of folk TCM, which makes it difficult for folk TCM practitioners to obtain "qualification" despite their "ability".

China's law on practicing doctors implements classified practice of doctors, but the division of the scope of practice of TCM doctors is seriously out of line with the actual clinical situation. Even the TCM graduates from regular colleges and universities can only squeeze themselves into the "Department of TCM" which is at a relative edge of the general hospital, and those who can not do so can only go away from their own specialty to other posts. As there are too many monks and few porridges, it is difficult for even TCM practitioners who have been taught by famous schools to obtain qualifications, so that naturally, there is no play of "folk visiting doctors".

At present, with the rise of Western medicine and the decline of TCM, TCM has also been squeezed into the cracks of the law. Nothing can be accomplished without norms or standards. It is precisely because of the lack of rules that there are many strange phenomena in the field of TCM: before Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize, few people knew her, and instead, Zhang Wuben, Ma Yueling and other swindlers pretended to be TCM practitioners and made a lot of money; some unverified "folk prescriptions" are easily and widely accepted and adopted, but Chinese medicine resources struggle with its own course.

Zhang Wuben said that "eating long eggplant can cure all kinds of difficult and miscellaneous diseases", which once made it difficult to find one long eggplant in the market; Ma Yueling said that "eating raw loach" can cure all kinds of diseases, so that more than one hundred people who ate loach in this way were hospitalized because of poisoning. These people not only cheated under the pretext of the TCM theory, but also caused the public to have a misunderstanding that TCM is deceiving, so that the reputation of TCM as the "national quintessence" is spoiled.

Time waits for no man to solve the disorders of TCM. The author believes that the most urgent task is to solve the "three disorders" of TCM through legislation.

The first step is to break the disorder of practicing qualification. The way is to formulate a law on practicing doctors of traditional Chinese medicine to let the "useful and beneficial" folk TCM practitioners have a license to openly and righteously hang a pot to cure the world and save the people, and let those "great gods" who can only bamboozle have no place to keep deceiving

The second step is to excavate and sort out the folk prescriptions and promote them to avoid the deviation caused by the "word of mouth" mode of TCM. Not all the "folk tested Prescriptions" are essence, and even some are nonsense that does not conform to medical principles. For example, according to media reports a few years ago, Zhang Keqin, an old man in Dengzhou, Henan Province, saw a "small tested prescription" for gallstones in a magazine, so he bought medicine according to the tested prescription and took it, resulting in his death.

The third step is to legislate to let TCM return to its original state and let the diagnosis and treatment of TCM have laws and regulations to follow. Under the folk TCM concept of "folk prescriptions are effective for serious diseases", some folk prescriptions and tested prescriptions have been spread by themselves, creating a situation of "all the people are doctors". Furthermore, traditional Chinese medicine has been added to a variety of foods under the theory of "medicine and food are of the same origin", and such foods have been boasted by merchants as a panacea that can "eat back" the disease. In fact, a lot of publicity is just exaggeration, and even hype by means of TCM.

TCM is China's great contribution to the world. How to make the TCM "national quintessence" flourish in the world and make more "Tu Youyou" appear in the TCM industry really needs a special law to set things right, eliminate the false and preserve the true, and straighten out the root cause, so as to "feel the pulse" and write a "prescription" for TCM.