A critique of western medical commentary on the People's Republic of China.

The American medical literature generally has given favorable reviews to the Chinese Communist experiment, which has often been credited with astonishing, unprecedented achievements in public health. Improvements are explicitly attributed to the Chinese political system, despite its acknowledged shortcomings from an American perspective. A survey of articles about Chinese medicine discloses numerous scientific flaws, eg, inadequate sampling, biased reporting, inappropriate attribution of causal relationships, lack of suitable controls, and ablation of conflicting data. The promulgation of such errors results in part from imprecise euphemistic language.