I have begged a patient to go to the emergency room.
Not suggested. Not recommended. Begged. I have sat across from someone in pain, someone afraid, someone who has been made to feel small and stupid by a system that was supposed to take care of them, and I have used every ounce of trust I’d built with them to push them through a door they did not want to walk through — because their life depended on it.
That is part of my job. I trained in Traditional Chinese Medicine, yes — but I also trained in Western medicine principles, neurology, pharmacology, and biomedical differential diagnosis. I know what I don’t treat. I know what needs a hospital, a surgeon, a prescription, an ER, now. Knowing the edges of my own scope isn’t a weakness in my training — it’s the whole point of it.
So I want to be direct about something, because I’m tired of dancing around it.
There’s a particular flavor of content that’s become common on Instagram and TikTok: doctors and other western healthcare providers filming themselves rolling their eyes at patients who’ve sought out acupuncture, herbalists, or “alternative” providers. Mocking them. Treating curiosity, fear, or a bad experience with the system as evidence of stupidity.I understand part of the impulse. Healthcare workers are exhausted, under-resourced, and genuinely worried about misinformation — and they’re right to be worried about a real problem. There are scam artists working this space: unlicensed grifters with no training selling miracle cures, charging desperate people for false hope, sometimes talking them out of care that could have saved their life. That’s not alternative medicine. That’s fraud wearing alternative medicine as a costume, and it makes my actual, regulated, licensed profession harder to practice and easier to dismiss in the same breath.
But that’s not who’s usually sitting in my treatment room, and it’s rarely who’s actually being mocked in those videos either. The target is broader than that — it’s anyone who sought out a licensed acupuncturist, a credentialed herbalist, a naturopath, anyone who dared to look outside the hospital system at all. Lumping us in with con artists isn’t accountability. It’s a shortcut around having to ask why people are leaving in the first place.
But here’s what gets lost in the doctor-versus-influencer narrative: most of the people walking into my clinic aren’t there because they watched a TikTok. They’re there because somewhere along the way, the system stopped listening to them. One pediatric endocrinologist described a 14-year-old patient who’d seen a “Hashimoto’s coach” online and stopped taking her thyroid medication — and that doctor’s honest reflection wasn’t to mock the family, it was to ask whether rising productivity demands and fifteen-minute visits leave any room for patients to feel heard in the first place. That’s the right question. It’s just rarely the one that gets asked out loud, in public, by the people with the loudest platforms.
People don’t end up afraid of hospitals because they’re foolish. They end up afraid because they were dismissed, rushed, talked over, or actually harmed — and then mocked for it on the way out.
I’m not interested in being part of an “us versus them” fight. I’m interested in results. So let’s actually look at what’s happening inside the system that feels so comfortable laughing at mine.
Medical error is a real, serious cause of death — and the medical establishment knows it. The most widely cited modern estimate, published in
The BMJ in 2016, calculated that medical errors account for roughly 251,000 deaths a year in U.S. hospitals
— enough to make medical error the third leading cause of death in the country, behind only heart disease and cancer. That number is debated; some researchers think the methodology overstates it, and there’s no perfect way to count deaths that aren’t reliably recorded on death certificates in the first place. But even the most conservative widely cited estimate, from the Institute of Medicine’s landmark 2000 report, put preventable adverse events at tens of thousands of deaths a year. Nobody seriously disputes that this is a major public health problem. It just doesn’t get the same Instagram Reel treatment that acupuncture skepticism does.
And then there’s private equity. This is the part that should actually be making headlines, because it’s getting worse, not better. A 2025 nationwide study from researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh, and other institutions —
published in the Annals of Internal Medicine — looked at over a million emergency department visits at hospitals acquired by private equity firms, compared against more than six million visits at similar, non-acquired hospitals.
…The finding was striking: patient deaths increased at hospitals acquired by private equity, showing a 13% increase in mortality relative to a baseline of 52 deaths per 10,000 visits, and the most likely explanation researchers point to is deep cuts to staffing and salaries, a common strategy private equity firms use to generate financial returns for investors. The same hospitals cut ICU salary spending by 16% and ED salary spending by 18% in the years after acquisition.
This isn’t an isolated finding. A separate landmark review in The BMJ analyzing dozens of studies across multiple countries found private equity ownership in healthcare was consistently associated with higher costs to patients and “mixed to harmful” impacts on quality of care, and earlier research found private equity acquisitions of nursing homes were linked to a meaningful rise in resident deaths.
So when I see a clinician with a financial stake in a system actively being hollowed out by private equity — a system where studies show staffing cuts are correlating with more deaths — turn around and mock the public for being “afraid of hospitals,” I have a hard time taking it seriously. People aren’t irrational for noticing that something is wrong. They’re paying attention.
Western medicine likes to present itself as the side of science, and everything outside it as the side of belief. That framing deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets — starting with how solidly Western medicine itself is actually backed by the standard it claims to hold everyone else to.
Here’s a number that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: according to a critical reappraisal published in medical literature, roughly 80% of medical treatments currently in clinical use have low-quality evidence behind them. Separate analyses put the share of therapies performed without the highest class of randomized trial evidence at around half. Half. That means a substantial portion of what gets prescribed, recommended, and performed in conventional medicine runs on expert consensus, clinical tradition, or simply accumulated practice — the same kind of evidence that is dismissed as superstition the moment it comes from a different tradition.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that makes Western medicine wrong, or that RCTs are meaningless. I’m saying the standard being applied to TCM — “not proven by the scientific method, therefore not credible” — is not the standard being applied consistently inside the house doing the judging.
There’s also a longer pattern worth naming. Western biomedicine has a habit of “discovering” mechanisms for things other systems had been using clinically for centuries, then treating the moment a mechanism is identified as the moment the phenomenon became real. The gut-brain connection is the clearest recent example. The deep link between digestion, emotional state, and overall health is foundational in Chinese medicine — it’s not a footnote, it’s a structural principle built into how the whole system reasons about the body. In mainstream Western medicine, that link spent most of the last century being treated as psychosomatic noise, a soft claim without hard backing. Then research on the vagus nerve and the gut microbiome gave it a mechanism, and suddenly it became a legitimate, heavily funded research field. The phenomenon didn’t change. The willingness to take it seriously did.
The most unambiguous example of what gets lost when an entire medical tradition is dismissed isn’t a theoretical argument. It’s a Nobel Prize.
Tu Youyou, a Chinese scientist, was tasked with finding a new treatment for malaria when existing drugs were failing. She went looking for leads in ancient Chinese medical texts — specifically a 1,700-year-old emergency handbook written by the physician Ge Hong — the same texts a purely Western-trained scientist would never have opened. She found a plant, Artemisia annua, that had been used for centuries in Chinese medicine to treat fever and malaria. She isolated the active compound, tested and proved it, and that compound — artemisinin — became one of the most important antimalarial drugs of the modern era, saving millions of lives. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
That drug exists today because someone took centuries of documented clinical Chinese medical knowledge seriously enough to go looking in it for answers that modern pharmacology hadn’t found on its own. There is an entire field — Chinese herbal pharmacology — with rigorous chemistry and clinical research behind it, largely invisible in Western medical training and Western media, except on the rare occasion it produces something undeniable enough to win the field’s highest prize. Artemisinin is not an anomaly. It’s a proof of concept for what gets missed.
There’s a story recounted by scholar Heiner Fruehauf in his introduction to Liu Lihong’s Classical Chinese Medicine that illustrates the opposite failure — what happens when a lab mistakes the most reduced, isolated version of an experiment for the most truthful one.
A research team wanted to test a traditional herbal formula long used by an experienced obstetrician to support labor in pregnant women. Standard procedure: they placed a female rabbit in a sterile incubator, surgically isolated the uterus outside the animal’s body, and injected the herbal solution directly onto the tissue. Nothing happened. Across multiple animals, still nothing. By the lab’s standard, the formula was disproven.
So the researchers went looking for substances that would make an isolated uterus contract in a dish. They found some. They declared those better candidates for clinical use. When those new, lab-validated substances — none of which had any traditional history of use for this purpose — were given to actual pregnant women by the same obstetrician, they produced no clinical effect at all.
The formula that worked on patients failed in the dish. The substance that worked in the dish failed on patients.
The lab had measured something real. It just wasn’t the thing that mattered. A uterus surgically removed from a living animal and placed in a sterile box is not the same organ anymore. It isn’t connected to a nervous system, a hormonal cascade, a living woman’s physiology in the specific context of labor. Treating a result on isolated tissue as the final word on what works in a whole human body is exactly the kind of categorical error that Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson — an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher
— spent an entire book, The Blind Spot, documenting as a deep, largely invisible flaw in how modern science has learned to see. The most reduced, controllable version of a phenomenon is not automatically the most real version of it. Sometimes context is not a variable to eliminate. Sometimes context is the mechanism.
There’s one more bias worth naming plainly. A great deal of acupuncture and herbal medicine research gets discounted wholesale on the grounds that it comes primarily from China, and that Chinese studies show an unusually high rate of positive results that doesn’t consistently replicate elsewhere. That’s a real data-quality question worth taking seriously — publication incentives and methodological rigor vary by research environment, and that’s true in medicine generally, not only in TCM.
But “investigate why” and “discard the field” are two very different responses, and the field receives the second far more often than the first. Industry-funded pharmaceutical trials in the United States have their own extensively documented publication bias toward positive results — this is not a TCM-specific problem; it is a structural feature of how research funding shapes outcomes across all of medicine. Nobody proposes dismissing Western drug research as a category on that basis. The willingness to apply that standard selectively — rigorously to one tradition, not to another — is itself a form of bias, dressed up as rigor.
A result is not automatically suspect because of its country of origin. Applying that assumption to an entire medical tradition, while exempting your own, is a regional filter pretending to be science.
I want to be honest: not everything in TCM has strong clinical trial support. Some of it does, some of it doesn’t, and some of it hasn’t been studied with the rigor it deserves yet. I say that as someone practicing inside this tradition, not as a critic of it. What I won’t accept is a double standard — where my field gets dismissed as belief while half of conventional practice runs on the same tier of evidence or less, where the evidence that exists gets selectively scrutinized, and where the rare moments TCM is unambiguously vindicated get treated as curiosities rather than as a pattern asking to be taken seriously. I live inside that asymmetry every day. It isn’t science. It’s a habit of attention.
I don’t want to tear down Western medicine. I want surgeons. I want emergency rooms. I want antibiotics and insulin and chemotherapy and every life-saving piece of pharmacology that exists because of rigorous science. Half of my own training is built on it, and I use it every single day to know when not to treat someone myself.
What I want is for that system to actually do its job — competently, humanely, without contempt for the people in front of it — and for the people working in it to stop treating curiosity about other forms of care as an insult to their expertise.
I don’t care what gets someone well. Diet. Acupuncture. Herbal medicine. Emergency surgery. A life-saving medication taken exactly as prescribed. I care about the outcome, not the turf. If a patient needs the ER, I will beg them to go. If a patient’s pain is something acupuncture and herbal medicine can actually resolve, I’ll treat it, document it, and refer out the moment it’s beyond what I’m trained for.
Here’s the chasm I actually mean. It isn’t a gap between two camps of equally-matched providers sniping at each other from opposite sides. It’s a hole — being dug, year over year, by understaffing, by private equity firms cutting nursing ratios to hit a return target, by a system that lets medical error become a top-tier cause of death and treats that as a cost of doing business rather than an emergency. That hole is where patients are falling. People are falling into it while undertreated, untreated, dismissed, or actually injured by the very system meant to catch them.
And instead of looking down into that hole — instead of reckoning with what private equity ownership is doing to staffing and mortality, instead of asking why patients are scared, instead of fixing the fifteen-minute visit and the rushed discharge and the contempt — too much of the conversation gets redirected sideways. At the patient, for being naive enough to fall. At people like me, for being there when they land.
I’m not the chasm. I didn’t dig it. Most days, I’m just one of the people standing at the bottom of it, doing triage, trying to get someone the right kind of help — sometimes mine, sometimes a hospital’s, sometimes both — while the people with the power to fill it back in are too busy yelling down at everyone inside it to notice it’s still getting wider.
If you’re navigating a complex health situation and aren’t sure where to start — whether that’s in my clinic or someone else’s — I’d rather you ask than guess. That’s the whole point.
