|
— updated 2017-01-28
|
|
— updated 2017-01-28
|
Herbalist Review, Issue 2016-#1:
|
|
Subtopics on this page…
Expert systems in TCM pattern diagnosisExpert systems for performing TCM pattern assessment have been attemped by numerous research groups around the world for several decades. At RMHI, we have been quietly and steadily working on our own version since 1992. And quietly, because unless one has something tangible to publicly demonstrate, most of these attempts have yielded disappointing results that are mostly reported in highly specialized research journals, in incomprehensible science-speak jargon to make the outcome seem more impressive, and then forgotten. Steadily, because this effort has required multiple layers and levels of features that had to be implemented before the entire system could hope to succeed: computerized syndrome, herb, and formula reference databases, database structures, inference engine logic, and a format that non-technical users could understand and interact with. (I possibly would have never begun this project if I had realized how complex it would become and how much work required, but in retrospect, I have a much more thorough understanding of traditional Chinese medicine than before I started.) Though there is a very crude expert system underlying TCM Herbal Tutor, our interactive game software for learning TCM syndrome-patterns, we never even used the word "expert system" to describe it, because as an analysis tool, this expert system would have been as disappointing as all its predecessors reported in the research literature. However, as an educational aid for the very limited task of generating random questions to help students gain skills in TCM pattern identification, it has been a solid success and has been a key element of RMHI's curriculum for over 15 years. TCM Herbal Tutor, however, has revealed through 15 years of student statistics, that only a small percentage of the population, about 10% has the cognitive skills required for learning TCM pattern reocgnition. This is the embarrassing secret behind the current status of the TCM profession, at least within the USA, for the past few decades. Many schools have effectively given up even trying to ensure that their graduates have this absolutely crucial skill, instead providing impressive-sounding substitutes: extensive course-work in an increasing array of western biomedical topics, study of medical Chinese and translation of the classical literature, rote memorization of hundreds of herbs and formulas and TCM theory. To illustrate how futile all this is, suppose I told you about an aspiring plumber who spent several years memorizing the parts catalogs of the major plumbing supply companies, could translate the catalogs written in other languages, and could recite in detail the history of plumbing all the way back to ancient Babylon, yet had not bothered to apprentice with anyone who actually knew how to use the specialized tools needed for removing and installing various kinds of pipes and the circumstances where each might be appropriate? Is this insane or not? I rest my case. When electronic calculators were first introduced to the general consumer market in the early 1970's, many white-collar professionals like accountants expressed fears that their jobs would be at risk, as computers progressively took over an increasing array of repetitive and boring tasks. That has not yet happened, even after 50 years. There is no doubt that calculators have changed the face of every field that involves mathematical calculations and even jobs that formerly did not depend on such calculations. As computing became faster and cheaper, the range of applications for its services has expanded at a faster rate than the computing technology itself has improved. While there are no guarantees for the future, science-fiction promises of truly intelligent computers that can replace human judgment have been vastly over-hyped, and in areas that developers have been over-eager to replace human judgment entirely, disaster has often been the consequence. From the years that I first studied traditional Chinese medicine ("TCM") in the mid 1980's, I recognized that it held some profound secrets that were only hinted at by a few of my early teachers. Dr. C.S. Cheung, one of my first teachers, long-time mentor and colleague, perhaps came the closest to pinpointing the essence of Chinese herbology as the art of identifying complex patterns from the clinical data of symptoms and signs. Chinese herbs themselves are not really that special; useful and potent herbs can be found in every continent. It is the sophisticated system of pattern-recognition logic that makes Chinese herbology unique among all the world's herbal/medical traditions; no other system even comes close to its level of detail. However, as Dr. Cheung pointed out, very few students of Chinese herbology have ever really mastered it; even the ancient master herbalists of their day commented on this. For more information on this problem, read:
Over the past 25 years, I have thought about this problem and discussed it at length with colleagues; numerous articles on our website have been a spinoff of this effort. I now believe that I can explain in mathematical detail why this has been the case and have proposed a very specific set of solutions to dramatically improve common understanding of its core principles. We have already implemented one solution that has been in use since 2000 - the TCM Herbal Tutor software. The second major breakthrough in this process is the recently completed AutoSage-TCM expert system software and the textbook and user's guide that accompanies it. Twentieth-century mathematicians and cybernetics pioneers like Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Bertrand Russell all recognized that any type of information (e.g.: mathematical equations, human language, visual images, sound recordings) could be reduced by encoding to a sequence of numbers. When computer technology became widely available, the internal number format most convenient for use was the binary system of 0's and 1's, reflecting the underlying physics of transistor logic in which a circuit state could be easily and quickly flipped from "on" to "off". Such state transitions could in turn trigger changes in the transistor circuits connected to it, thus allowing not only the storage of information as numbers but complex logical and mathematical operations on this information. Within the previous year, we have been putting the finishing touches on expert-system software that we have christened "AutoSage-TCM". It represents 25 years of work, beginning with an early, aborted attempt in the early 1990's, after I recognized that Chinese medicine was far more sophisticated than I had ever suspected. Over a decade would pass as I thought about the problem, discussing it with close colleagues in TCM, computer science, signals processing, and mathematics. That was probably just as well, because the current algorithm implemented by AutoSage-TCM would have required over 100 hours of CPU time only 20 years ago on a typical desktop computer of that era. Hopelessly slow. Now it requires only a few minutes of CPU time to process a single typical clinical case report. In the textbook and user's guide to AutoSage-TCM, I include detailed explanations of the logic underlying pattern recognition in traditional Chinese medicine. This entire textbook volume will be included in the Free option of future versions of HerbalThink-TCM. There are several reasons for this, but the top reason is that I feel it is important to get this information out to a large number of people. How will this affect previous and future RMHI graduates?
The economics of TCM health care - ancient China vs. nowI have never been one to assume that the status-quo methods for doing anything are either correct or desirable. Ever since my childhood I always had some awareness of the Matrix of Illusion that was continually being spun around me. Religion, politics, the medical-industrial complex, corruption in the legal profession, the self-contained ivory-tower delusions of academia were ideas I grew up with; my grandfather was one of the very early conspiracy theorists. Now that the Internet is waking people up on a mass scale, I am relieved that I can now discuss many of these subjects without inducing states of cognitive dissonance in my listeners and readers. Let's consider some of the economic, political, and social reasons why traditional Chinese medicine has for many centuries been transmitted by the terribly inefficient means of rote memorization, which modern educational psychology studies have repeatedly shown results in generally poor levels of comprehension and cognitive ability. The information may be retained like religious dogma in the minds of its students, but very few come to understand and utilize this knowledge at a high level of competence. But so what? If you, the emperor of China, require that only a tiny percentage of herbalist-physicians ever fully understand what they have memorized, then a system of education by rote memorization may serve your purposes quite nicely. After all, if there is a limited supply of rare and valuable herbs like Ginseng and Cordyceps, why train large numbers of people to understand and appreciate their use? Better to keep the highest knowledge of Chinese medicine restricted to only a select elite, who can pass the rigorous medical exams required of all physicians allowed to treat the royal family and the nobility. Rote memorization has long been used in Asia as a tool of social control, to train a population of compliant subjects who do not question authority and can no longer even think to question it. Fast forward to our modern era of medical technology and pharmaceutical corporations: while the methods of medicine have changed radically, the underlying motivations have not really changed that much. It is still highly profitable for the controllers of society to keep people ignorant of how their monetary and legal systems are manipulated for the profit of a few, how their foods and medicines are contaminated with poisons that guarantee huge profits for the medical-industrial complex, and how their religions are manipulated to keep the population in fear of hell-fire if they get out of line and to fear people of alien cultures and religions. So the question is how does this affect the education of so-called "alternative" forms of health care, which, if effective, might prove to become a threat to the system? Simple, the formula has not altered much for thousands of years: Offer practitioners of those methods social and economic status by licensing them, regulating their schools to "improve" quality, and offering reimbursement through insurance and government health plans like Medicare and Medicaid if they toe the line and do not become too independent. After accepting these economic and intellectual constraints, it will be easy to infiltrate the bureaucracies that control these schools to dumb down their curricula, expunge anything of real value, and gradually substitute modern medical notions. This has happened in all the so-called alternative health professions over the past 100 years: acupuncture, naturopathy, chiropractic, osteopathy, massage therapy. Each time some new upstart makes major breakthroughs, its profession is offered the promise of more status and greater economic benefits in exchange for regulation and licensing. I repeatedly hear old-timers in each of these professions bemoan how their professions have deteriorated and younger practitioners seem content to be merely second-rate varieties of medical practitioner. A possible solution to this cycle of control and corruption has been already revealed by the Internet. Millions of people worldwide have learned to circumvent the former hierarchies of control and share information directly with other ordinary people seeking answers. That is the key to how Chinese herbology has to evolve if it intends to remain relevant. Practitioners must reach out to the public, of which a rapidly growing percentage is demanding significant involvement in their health care; they wish to know the how, why, and wherefore, and to be involved in all decision-making. AutoSage-TCM will finally make available to all a detailed means for verifying the pattern-assessment skills of their practitioners and whether they are adhering to correct protocols of traditional Chinese herbology. I fully expect that RMHI graduates will come out looking good when the dust settles. Interesting readingFor anyone who is seriously considering studying traditional Chinese medicine, I highly recommend the following 13-page essay by Heiner Fruehauf:
Though I attained a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and worked in medical research prior to studying Chinese medicine, I generally agree with Fruehauf's observation that naive scientific-materialistic attempts to modernize traditional Chinese medicine have been a disaster in almost all respects. I would only add the following observation: The Chinese Communist bureaucrats who destroyed traditional Chinese medicine and substituted it with the stripped-down and zombified version they designated as "TCM" abused the true scientific method by applying the methods of cybernetics and information theory to a subject they neither respected nor understood. Like a set of carpenter's tools, cybernetics is merely a set of tools, which can be used constructively to build useful and wonderful things; these same tools can also be used to commit murder. As thousands of alternative investigative journalists have revealed over the past few decades, scientist and academics have shown a penchant for corruption, fraud, and a willingness to distort the truth just as readily as politicians and corporate executives when vast amounts of money and power are at stake. While I am in agreement and sympathy with Fruehauf's assessment of the situation, I would merely point out that without integrity, any set of intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual paradigms may be abused to produce a result that destroys life, promote lies and deceptions, and results in a general disintegration of human culture.
|
