This is very, very bad.
Ahhhh, "skeptics." ICD codes are used for reimbursement and codification. Pure and simple. That the ICD is integrating "traditional" chinese modalities indicates that insurance companies are seeking to make inroads into China. This is the same as saying watercolor artists will be lobbying hard to make sure everyone describes everything in terms of tempera paint. "Skeptics" should be fucking celebrating this shit because what it does is give large health organizations an opportunity to codify, accept or reject traditional chinese medicine. ICD codes are taxonomy and this is nothing more than a taxonomy translation module. No one fuckin' says Premera has to cover "Bladder Meridian Problem." What it says is that when you have a shit-ton of data about hypertension without requiring an entire culture of doctors to learn your terminology. But sure. Be outraged. Be afraid. Have your fundamental understanding of the world threatened by an exploration of alternate terminology. After all, The ICD has been a staid and respectable body of terminology so far. By the bye: the opioid epidemic became visible only after individual healthcare practitioners undertook the Herculean labor of translating every country doctor's euphemism of "drug overdose" into something that could be parsed by vital statistics databases. By your argument, John Snow was a pseudoscientist.Well that’s a relief! Of course, you and I know that, once ICD-11 is adopted, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), such as naturopaths, acupuncturists, and the like, will be lobbying hard to make sure that this chapter is used.
Except qi does not cause mass epidemics... sans the ones our minds create. There's no reason to codify "liver yin deficiency pattern" in a scientific taxonomy. The author notes how it might be useful for research and historical purposes. There's no reason to affirm unscientific beliefs within science. I'd rather the person in charge of my health only use science and nothing else. There are 14 000+ entries in ICD-10, according to (citation-needed text from) Wikipedia. Most of the lists I find online median to about 20 silly entries (like your "bitten by a cow"). 0.0014 is a decent margin of error for such a titanic amount of work.By your argument, John Snow was a pseudoscientist.
After all, The ICD has been a staid and respectable body of terminology so far.
There's every reason to codify "liver yin deficiency pattern." If you've got "liver yin deficiency pattern" statistics on a billion Chinese citizens, and you can run comparative analysis to determine a Venn diagram of what western maladies (hypertension, high cholesterol, etc) fall under "liver yin deficiency pattern", you've just increased your sample size by a billion. The John Snow argument is that he used nonconventional methods and approaches (remember, this is before germ theory) to lessen a cholera outbreak. Mass hysteria has nothing to do with it - this is a terminology and taxonomy discussion because ICD codes are used for terminology and taxonomy only. They are the lingua franca of medical afflictions. "Scientific?" "Unscientific?" You... do realize that by phrasing things like that you're arguing that a form of medicine practiced by one fifth of the population of the world is hogwash, right? Now: you can think it's hogwash. I can think it's hogwash. We can all agree that it's hogwash but the fact of the matter is, if it's the hogwash in place, it's the hogwash you interact with. Full stop. Even now, you've got a religious fervor about your value system and you want to smite the infidel for believing something else... how you think that's gonna go over? Gonna crusade on in there and insist they believe in the god of hypertension? As to your "titanic amount of work" you are arguing - in this very thread - that the whole of the effort is not undermined by some silly shit. Yet here you are, panties in a twist over the silly shit. Which is it? Which is it going to be? Does all of the terminology matter? How much silly shit is okay? Oh, but it's the principle of the thing, right? I mean, "hit by a meteor" is a factual problem while "liver yin" is not. but that's because you didn't grow up with liver yin. Neither did I. But I'm not arrogant enough to argue that everyone has to accept my terminology, especially when we're talking about bringing it under the umbrella of conventional medicine where it has to peacefully coexist with shit in the Lancet. Now go ahead and explain how bringing up "mass hysteria" is anything other than an argumentative, insulting and counterproductive tangent to inject into this conversation. I'll wait.
No. I'm not playing this game. Seek fight elsewhere.Now go ahead and explain how bringing up "mass hysteria" is anything other than an argumentative, insulting and counterproductive tangent to inject into this conversation. I'll wait.
P.S. I have a massive deja vu about this article.Soon (or maybe not so soon if the US takes as long to implement ICD-11 as it did to implement ICD-11), I will be able to code for liver yin deficiency pattern (ICD-11 code SF50) or liver qi stagnation pattern (ICD-11 code SF57)