A Historical Approach And Philosophical Analysis Of The Relationship Between Evidence-Based Medicine And Traditional Chinese Medicine

There are considerable issues raised on the relationship between the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) since the term EBM first came to China in the second half of 1990s. Both EBM advocates and TCM proponents hope EBM may speed up the modernization of TCM in China, and they apparently expect it most. Here we try to find out what EBM originally targeted and the essential changes it intends to make towards the idea and practice of clinical medicine. For reaching this aim we took a historical approach to the emergence of the very term EBM. After that, with the methodological characters we recognized from the historical research we made a comparative study of EBM and TCM, and thus conclude that there are invincible difficulties for TCM clinical practice to adopt EBM methods, which is far from what most EBM and TCM advocates expect.