Beyond The Medicine Wars: Why India Needs To Learn From China's Integration Model
India's medical establishment attacks traditional medicine while China embraces it.
When chess grandmaster Vidit Gujrathi proudly posted a Doctor's Day photo calling his Ayurvedic family members 'doctors", he unleashed medical establishment fury. Dr Cyriac Abby Philips—the hepatologist known as @theliverdr—disparaged his post, declaring 'none of them are really doctors". This vicious attack perfectly exemplifies the toxic hostility India's medical establishment reserves for traditional medicine. My own X (previously Twitter) battles with Dr Philips revealed the same ugly pattern: an ideological warfare which trumps any real scientific curiosity or enquiry.
Here's my honest take: if a loved one had a major accident, I'd rush them to a modern hospital without hesitation. But once past the crisis and into recovery? I'd recommend Ayurvedic healing—yoga, pranayama, aligned diet. For chronic conditions, there's solid research backing Ayurveda's effectiveness. Positing one modality as 'evidence-based medicine" champion and the other as 'pseudoscience" smacks of the quackery the medical establishment accuses others of. Rather than serve patients, or science, it only serves to deny.
When I visited China, I was struck by how seamlessly they've woven traditional medicine into their modern healthcare fabric. Walk into any major hospital and you'll find TCM departments running alongside surgical wards. Patients don't see contradiction—many still consider these 'TCM hospitals" even while receiving cutting-edge medical procedures and surgeries. This isn't accidental—it's smart policy. Under Xi Jinping, China has passed 26 policies elevating TCM to 'national treasure" status. The 2017 Traditional Chinese Medicine Law mandated TCM institutions in public hospitals, while the 2016-2030 Strategic Plan allocated 50 billion yuan for development.
Ironically, even communist China embraced traditional medicine, while our home grown 'progressives" remain stuck in old dogma. TCM and Ayurveda are sister sciences which share ancient DNA. Both emerged from similar foundations: constitutional medicine (prakriti versus constitution), delicate energy balance (doshas versus qi), sophisticated pulse diagnosis revealing hidden ailments, and natural pharmacology working with the body rather than against it. Both emphasize prevention over cure, viewing health holistically—mind, body, and spirit dancing in harmony. The Silk Road facilitated deep medical knowledge exchange between Indian and Chinese physicians, with documented cross-pollination enriching both traditions. If China can successfully weave traditional medicine into modern healthcare while maintaining scientific standards, India should easily achieve the same with Ayurveda.
The double standards are mind-boggling. A Wall Street Journal headline during SARS celebrated how Chinese Medicine—including cow urine—was 'finding new respect in Western medicine". The same substance routinely mocked by India's medical establishment gained international recognition when China's protocols actually worked. Meanwhile, pranayama gets serious study in Western universities, with researchers documenting measurable cardiovascular benefits in peer-reviewed journals. Yet the narrow-minded dogmas of some in India's Medical Establishment, preempts research at home which could help India lead the world in this medical revolution.
This intellectual dishonesty crystallised during my exchanges on X (formerly Twitter) with Dr. Philips. When he attacked Giloy using an observational study—hardly gold-standard evidence—I pointed out the obvious: observational studies can't establish causation. Moreover, his study failed to confirm the tested substances were actually Giloy; contamination might have caused the reported liver damage. The contradiction became glaring when in the same post he dismissed Ashwagandha as 'pseudoscientific" despite multiple double-blind RCTs proving its efficacy.
A 2019 study in Medicine showed Ashwagandha improved memory and executive function in cognitive impairment patients. A 2020 Journal of Ethnopharmacology study documented significant cortisol reduction and better sleep. These aren't folk tales—they meet modern medicine's exact methodological standards. Dr. Philips' response to actual evidence-based medicine which he claims to champion? He blocked me.
What we witnessed was scientific hypocrisy in real-time. Dr Philips rejected rigorous clinical trials while promoting weak observational studies, violated the basic principle that correlation doesn't equal causation, and based sweeping condemnations on uncontrolled case reports from a handful of patients. This represents fundamental abandonment of scientific methodology—ironically, the same unscientific approach he accuses traditional practitioners of having. Here's the uncomfortable truth: modern medicine modalities don't automatically equal 'evidence-based".
There's plenty of rigorous evidence for traditional medicine—both validated over millennia and proven by contemporary methods including RCTs. The reactionary approach of some allopathic practitioners makes them more 'dogma-based" than science-based. Dr Philips perfectly exemplifies this ideological pseudo-scientific approach. When ideology trumps evidence, everyone loses—especially patients seeking relief.
China's success tells a completely different story. Look beyond Covid headlines and you'll see systematic results across medicine. Their stroke rehabilitation protocols blending Traditional Chinese Medicine with conventional therapy show significantly better outcomes—improved Modified Barthel Index scores and enhanced neurological function versus Western medicine alone. In cardiovascular disease, systematic reviews of 17 RCTs involving 11,726 patients using TCM demonstrated significant improvements across stable angina, myocardial infarction, and coronary artery disease.
Diabetes management through integrated protocols achieves glycemic control comparable to standard medications but with fewer dangerous hypoglycemic episodes. In China there are a reported 1.28 billion annual patient visits to TCM institutions, with TCM integrated across all three hospital tiers—from township clinics to major urban centers. This is a results-driven healthcare policy, rather than a religious proclamation about who can be called as a doctor.
India's medical establishment desperately needs a reality check. Our medical colleges don't just teach skepticism toward traditional practices—they actively indoctrinate students into derision and superiority. This is ideological programming wearing the medical mask of scientific training. It closes minds to evidence and creates doctors more interested in protecting turf than treating patients. We need China's pragmatic model: rigorous research on traditional treatments using modern standards, stringent quality control for herbal products addressing legitimate safety concerns, integrated training exposing students to both systems, and patient-centered outcomes over academic ego battles.
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The path forward is about choosing real science over ideology, evidence over prejudice, patient welfare over professional ego. We also need to revise laws which empanel these colonial dogmas on who can heal. China proved integration works when approached systematically rather than defensively. India has both ancient wisdom and modern expertise. What we lack is intellectual humility in the medical establishment to acknowledge no single system has all answers and the courage to find the best healing treatments and healthcare practices which serve patients, not the ideology of some doctors.
The author is a commentator on Indian policy and society. He can be followed on X @sankrant. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views
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First Published:
July 07, 2025, 16:20 IST
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