Scheid Volker
School of Integrated Health, University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, Westminster, London W1W 6UW, United Kingdom.
Complement Ther Med. 2007 Mar;15(1):54-68. doi: 10.1016/j.ctim.2005.12.002. Epub 2006 Feb 9.
CAM researchers commonly treat traditional medicines as unchanging systems. This article questions the validity of this approach by examining the treatment of menopausal syndrome by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Such treatment strategies were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. While they determine TCM treatment of menopausal syndrome in the West, physicians in China and Japan use many other treatment strategies from within the wider Chinese medical tradition in clinical practice. Cultural variability in the manifestation of menopausal syndrome furthermore questions the usefulness of simply importing treatment strategies from China to the West. This leads me to conclude that Chinese medicine as such can never be evaluated by means of clinical research. What we can do is use Chinese medicine as a resource for thinking about illness, and for formulating clinical interventions that may then be assessed using methods of evidence based research.
补充替代医学（CAM）研究者通常将传统医学视为一成不变的体系。本文通过审视中医对更年期综合征的治疗，对这种方法的有效性提出质疑。此类治疗策略发明于1964年，明显受到生物医学思维的强烈影响。虽然它们决定了西方中医对更年期综合征的治疗，但中国和日本的医生在临床实践中会采用更广泛的中医传统中的许多其他治疗策略。更年期综合征表现的文化差异进一步质疑了简单地将中国的治疗策略引入西方的实用性。这使我得出结论，中医本身永远无法通过临床研究来评估。我们所能做的是将中医作为思考疾病以及制定临床干预措施的资源，然后可以使用循证研究方法对这些干预措施进行评估。
