science

I do not mean mixing pseudoscience with science. I mean that traditional Chinese medicine, which modern Chinese medicine is based on, if you would bother to do even the tiniest bit of research on the history of medicine, is based on a system of give and take, ying/yang, of flow, and with Qi. This philosophical basis means that they are less binary with their definitions and allow for more gradient thinking. Given that living is a delicate neurochemical and microbe balance, a give and take - it seems much more of an accurate view of the body and this has benefitted them a lot. They cured HIV and herpes with CRISPR-CAS9. It's genuinely incredible.

China, India, Arabic countries, and then finally Greece and Western countries all influenced each other with medicine because they were on the silk road. The first medical compendiums ever made were made by Arabic scholars over hundreds of years, because they were in the center of all of this information. They also invented the first hospitals, and due to Islam's values with charity, were meant to be free to use. These are valid scientific endeavors that enabled more research and a greater variety of case studies. It's why hospitals to this day have wings for roughly each area of the body - eg doctors who read the section of the compendium on eyes would be eye doctors in the eye wing. It wasn't expected in Arabic medicine that every doctor would treat every condition because the literature was so vast.

The body doesn't discretely separate out organs though. It doesn't say "oh well that's a kidney issue so I can't hurt the heart." Western medicine tends to inappropriately segment the body into discrete parts which are actually related. I have personally made connections in the medical field knowing that this is the blind spot in Western medicine, and when I look at studies to confirm my hunches - China did the research. This is what I mean about them having an advantage. We'd have to bring real philosophy back into science if we want to catch up.