Talk:Sowa Rigpa (Traditional Tibetan medicine)

Need citations.

This page needs a lot of improvements in terms of references. Without references, the factual accuracy of the article cannot be determined.

The only reference, the NYT article, contained no references. It is not a suitable source. Coconut99 99 (talk) 21:06, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I haven't finished integrating the NYT article with inline citation. I fail to see why it is not a suitable source for basic information. --Gimme danger (talk) 23:12, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

NYT is a newspaper, not an academic journal. If it is regarding a news on a treatment, ya sure you can reference it. But by itself it cannot be used as a reliable source of other types of information. Facts come from somewhere and not just out of thin air. Please go and check any academic journals / books, they all have references. Coconut99 99 (talk) 05:35, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:RS says nothing about reliable sources requiring references. I understand that academic journals and books have references. Newspaper articles do not and they are specifically cited as reliable sources by Wikipedia policy. --Gimme danger (talk) 21:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, newspapers are suitable citations for news items. However, that doesn't mean it is suitable for academic stuff here. You are a CS student (I assume that you're a graduate student), you should know better. Please check WP:Reliable source examples.

Also, the article (with unknown author of unknown expertise) contains mostly quotes, making it even less suitable.

Lastly, the article made little mentioning of material in this page. This page is WP:OR.

Until the citations / references are fixed, the two flags are here to stay. Coconut99 99 (talk) 00:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Fine with me. I just don't have the time to look up academic sources right now. Hopefully by August we can take those tags down. --Gimme danger (talk) 03:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I have added a couple of citations that come from traditional sources that can be verified. Hopefully this will help the article a bit. Is there anyway that I can suggest the tags be taken down given that the author hasn't made the changes since 2008 according to this page? Liegong (talk) 22:48, 2 November 2011 (UTC)Liegong

Needs content

What are references like 'Determination of Free Fatty Acids in Tibet Folk Medicine Lomatogonium rotatum with Fluorescence Detection and Mass Spectrometric Identification' doing here? We need references to the Tibtan opus surely? One could hope that a contributor was able to provide Tibetan characters. Rinpoche (talk) 00:35, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

history

a big chunk seems to be lifted from http://www.men-tsee-khang.org/medicine/mhistory.htm which is also referenced by another site here: http://www.rinpoche.com/stories/tibet3.htm

the use of "we" in this section leads me to believe that this wasn't written for wikipedia. ViniTheHat (talk) 04:20, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://www.men-tsee-khang.org/medicine/mhistory.htm http://indianmedicine.nic.in/printcont.asp?lid=150. Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 23:36, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Some recent problematic edits by User:Quigley

First edit 19 November 2010:

• You have removed the title "three principle of functions" without explanation (the title was later restored by another editor).
• You have added a new section with the title "Usage". This is a very commendable addition, however the text you have added doesn't deal with the "usage" of Traditional Tibetan medicine, but is a summary of a newspaper article titled "Push to bring Tibetan medicine to the world", presenting the objectives of the Chinese government to promote Traditional Tibetan medicine in Tibet, in the rest of China and abroad. You have often removed text that you considered "off topic" in other articles, so I wonder about this addition under a chapter titled "Usage".

Second edit 11 June 2011:

• During the merging with another similar article, you have removed 11 out of the 14 external links in the original article (and haven't added any from the merged article). I fully agree with you that there were "excessive external links" in the original article, but I simply wonder if it is suitable to delete material from the original article at the same time of merging content from another article. I also wonder based on which criteria you selected the 3 worthy remaining links. Did you make any relevance assessment, or did you simply delete ALL links between number 4 and number 11?

Third edit 25 November 2011: Here start the "serious" things:

• First you have inserted the following sentence: "However, the Chinese government has also systematically introduced biomedicine (so-called Western medicine) into Tibet, such that in the Tibetan language, biomedicine is called "Chinese medicine" (Tibetan: རྒྱ་སྨན, Wylie: rgya sman) or "Communist medicine" (Tibetan: ཏང་སྨན, Wylie: tang sman)."

With surprise I noticed that:

1. This sentence is again totally unrelated to the topic : "usage of Traditional Tibetan Medicine"
2. You have completely transformed the meaning of the paper you are giving as reference, which says "However, there is also a wide range of ways in which 'biomedicine' or 'Western medicine' is actually integrated or practiced together with Tibetan medicine. This is especially evident, for example, when we compared Tibetan medicine as practiced in Britain and the United States with the way it is practices at the Lhasa Mentsikhang or the Dharamsala Men-Tsee-Khang, where X-ray machines and stethoscopes are used side by side with pulse diagnosis, for example." And lower on the same page: "we find that the integration of Tibetan medicine with biomedicine on the Tibet Plateau is also a highly creative frontier of theory and practice, just as it is in exile or the Himalaya."
3. The article speaks about the similarities between the integration of traditional and western medicine in both Tibet and in exile, and instead you created a completely different meaning by by creating differences between the pracices in Tibet or in exile.

• Secondly you inserted this sentence just below the reference to the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala: "Many backpackers and tourists from around the world come to Dharamsala to seek Tibetan herbal medicine. However, many of them end up seriously ill in conventional hospitals, because their belief in Tibetan medicine precluded early-stage allopathic treatment, like antibiotics, for simple ailments. In some cases, the accumulated mercury and other heavy metals in "Tibetan herbal pills" have caused acute renal failure and death."

Again with surprised, I noticed that:

1. You have deleted the sentence saying that the Men-Tsee-Kang " now has 48 branch clinics in India and Nepal"
2. You selectively omit to mention that the Men-Tsee-Khang is equipped with modern western medicine equipment and is integrating western and Tibetan medicine (see article above).
3. You make a subtle association between the Men-Tsee-Khang and the tourists ending seriously ill in conventional hospital, while the book you are citing is speaking about "a handful of traditional Tibetan medical practitioners in town", so nothing to do with the Men-Tsee-Kang itself, but rather with private practitioners of dubious medical standards, which you can find all over India and China.
4. You say that "tourists from around the world come to Dharamsala to seek Tibetan herbal medicine", while the book you refer to say that these tourist go there to "enjoy the closest thing to a Tibetan Shangri-la that they could find", but that, "given that we were in India, some of these folks got sick".
5. You said that " in some cases, the accumulated mercury and other heavy metals in "Tibetan herbal pills" have caused acute renal failure and death." The author of the book is actually a bit more cautious, saying that he "had heard that some of the "herbal" pills might contain … " and mentioning one single case of a Tibetan pharmacist who died of renal failure "possibly because of an accumulation of these heavy metals"
6. You also selectively omit to mention that the quality issues and fake drugs do not only happen in Dharamsala. The very same article you are referring to in the first paragraph does indeed discuss in length (7 paragraphs) about the fake Tibetan drugs on the Chinese market, mentioning for example that there are about 40 manufacturers of fake Tibetan drugs in Qinghai and Gansu provinces only (statement from a drug administration official in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province). Instead, you preferred to pick an anecdote of someone saying "I heard that … might contain". Is this what you call reliable sources according to Wikipedia standards?

• Third, just after the deaths story, you mention that Tibetan herbal formulas have not been approved by the FDA.

1. The article you are referring to does not directly say that Tibetan herbal formulas have not been approved by the FDA,but rather than "Many Tibetan herbal formulas are so rich and complex as to defy any conceivable efforts at FDA approval under prevailing legal rules."
2. Some Tibetan medicines have actually received approval (if not as medicine, as nutritional complement or whatever) for commercialisation in Western country (including USA), yartsa gunbu being the most famous example. Not that I recommend it, there have been cases of lead poisoning…
3. Your remark regarding non-approval from FDA could actually have been linked to the first paragraph regarding the "Push to bring Tibetan medicine to the world" instead of the second paragraph related to Dharamsala.

I won't cite WP policies and guidelines, as you may accuse me again of wikilawyering, but my point is that your selective representation of sources, misquoting, quoting out of context and removal of relevant information represent a clear case of biased edits, which do not serve the purpose of Wikipedia to present encyclopaedic knowledge in a neutral point of view. --Pseudois (talk) 20:05, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

References

This (and the below section) is clearly a personalized attack against me, rather than a constructive criticism of the article text. You already have a thesis about my character, and you have combed through my edits on this article for things which you don't understand, and for which you can assume nefarious motives. If you were to assume good faith, and seek reasons for which my edits might be right, rather than why they might be wrong, then you could, for example, look at the guideline for external links to see why I might have removed the links to individual TTM manufacturers, suppliers and customers. If you want to write apologias of TTM, then be bold, but don't fault me for "omissions" which would take me additional time to research, and which would ultimately slant a pro-TTM article even further in that direction. Your reversion, which suppressed all information about the potential health risks of TTM, apparently as an act of vindictiveness for our past interactions in another topic area, certainly does not serve the purpose of building a neutral encyclopedia. Quigley (talk) 23:36, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you if you can can remain factual, and equally assume good faith from my side. Thank you also for not putting in others people mouths points they haven't said or written. I have no interest either in writing an apologia of Tibetan Medicine. My remarks were factual and do intend to serve the purpose of building a neutral encyclopaedia. Again, thank you if you can be factual in the discussion, instead of restricting it to personal comments (links answer apart - please note that I did not revert them).--Pseudois (talk) 06:58, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Right; your interest probably isn't in writing an apologia of TTM; or at least not as much as it is to undermine, discourage, and intimidate me. Let's review the facts. I've been editing this page since over a year ago, as you've indicated in your painstaking review of my edits on this page. (Thus, your title of "recent problematic edits by Quigley" is deceptive; you've not noticed recent edits, but you've looked for all my edits, though curiously excluding the ones where I did unambiguous good, like removing blatant copyright violations.) Your recent involvement in this article, in contrast to mine, is totally incongruous with self-proclaimed interests and contribution history are a single-purpose mountaineering account.

Our first interaction at the Talk:Xixabangma page move saw you greatly personalize the positions pro and contra the move, of 虞海 (Yú Hǎi) especially but also of me, who you perceived to on his side. When you didn't get the page move that you wanted, you declared your intention (and asked for help) to "monitor the activities" of 虞海 and me, adding that the only reason why you're not reverting all of our edits is "time and IT skills". And so, you've picked fights with me on articles, wrote sarcastic screeds on my talk page, and incited opposition against me on other people's talk pages. Why do I mention all this? Because these sections here are a blatant continuation of this policy of harassment and intimidation.

Let's look at your most recent language: each sentence in this accusatory section begins with some permutation of, "You selectively omit to mention...", "I also wonder based on which criteria you selected...", or "You make a subtle association...". You, you, you, you. Is that not already personalized? Oh, but let's make sure who we're talking about. The title of this section: "Some recent problematic edits by User:Quigley". The paragraph starters on the next section: "Current version edited by user:Quigley", (and again) "Current version edited by user:Quigley". You, you, you, you, User:Quigley, User:Quigley, User:Quigley. If that's not enough to make me defensive, you punctuate this talk page section with direct and bitter allusions to our interactions on other articles: "You have often removed text that you considered "off topic" in other articles" and "you may accuse me again of wikilawyering". And what's the conclusion to this section? "my point is that your selective representation of sources... represent a clear case of biased edits, which do not serve the purpose of Wikipedia". That conclusion shows that your goal is not ultimately to improve the article, but to make a case against me, as an editor. Not even against my recent edits, because you reviewed all of them from November 2010 for things you could object to, things that you didn't understand, or things that you think you could have done better. And for all the time you spent writing this up, you didn't make a single constructive edit to this article.

So that flashy writeup was purely an excuse to revert my edits—here, as you've shamelessly sought to do all over Wikipedia since our Xixabangma naming disagreement, from which I have long since disengaged. This is not about the encyclopedia; this is not about neutrality; this is about your bruised ego. You would do well to start a new section with depersonalized discussion points if you want to constructively debate the article text, and not just me. Quigley (talk) 17:28, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Would it be possible to remain focused and discuss factually the points I raised regarding the Traditional Tibetan Medicine article, rather than starting another intimidating diatribe against my person? If you want me to answer point by point your post, I don't think this is the right place to do it, so I would prefer to do it on your talk page (but if you prefer I can also do it here).

I have raised 12 precise objections to explain why I reverted your last edit. So far you haven't given a single answer to any of these 12 objections.--Pseudois (talk) 18:49, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

My point is that the way you came to this article and wrote and titled this section is immensely personalized and insulting. You came to this article with the intention of attacking my character, and your objections have more innuendo than substance. I have explained in my first reply to this section that for most of your "objections", if you sought reasons in policy for why I might have made the changes that I did, rather than why I should not have, then you would find the answer to your questions and suspicions. If you can answer the charges of harassment on my talk page, without denial, sarcasm, or redirection, as has been your previous code of conduct there; then please do so. In a show of good faith, I will explain my reasoning for my edits, although I am not required to do so.

1. The introduction of allopathic medicine into Tibet which now supplants or supplements TTM in its birthplace is indeed relevant to a section discussing the usage of TTM.
2. The paper isn't about the integration of TTM and allopathic medicine, as you say; that's just a digression on one page. As an introduction, it deals mostly with terms and definitions, for which I have provided some Tibetan-language words.
3. I disagree that I created any explicit contrast between the practice of TTM in Tibet and in exile. The literature on the latter is just more thorough, and your sensitivities may be conflating brevity with a positive attitude.
4. Yes, I deleted the information about how many branches Men-Tsee-Kang because it sounds promotional, and because it is not useful to a broad understanding of TTM.
5. Why should I have mentioned Men-Tsee-Kang's non-TTM facilities? This article is about TTM. It's not an issue of balance, since I didn't mention Tibet University of Traditional Tibetan Medicine's non-TTM facilities; nor those of Qinghai University Medical School.
6. No, I am not trying to create "subtle associations" between Men-Tsee-Kang and anything. There was existing information about Men-Tsee-Kang in the section about TTM in Dharamsala, and I added my new material about TTM practice in Dharamsala in the same section.
7. I'm fine with modifying the sentence to give the whole range of reasons why people come to Dharamsala. When the doctor speaks about the foreigners from Auroville, he goes on at length about how "so many of the tourists and settlers I met in Dharamsala believed that embracing Tibetan medicine required the complete rejection of Western (allopathic) medicine." It's fair to say that the foreigners who go to Dharamsala are a self-selected group in terms of their spiritual (and associated medical) beliefs.
8. When talking about preventable deaths for TTM patients, the wording can be cautious; I agree. But there's a delicate balance we have to strike between proper attribution and whitewashing.
9. There's no sinister reason why I didn't do more writing on unsafe Tibetan drugs in Chinese markets. I would not oppose it if you included such information in the article text. Since you found a more reliable source than the one I used, I welcome it.
10. The idea that Tibetan herbals formulas are too "rich and complex" to be approved by the FDA is meaningless pro-TTM puffery. Wikipedia's job isn't to refute the FDA.
11. Like many of your "objections", your pointing to yartsa gunbu's use as a nutritional supplement is not really an objection to my edits, but a protest that I didn't cover thoroughly enough your favorite pro-TTM arguments in my writing. Why don't you focus on improving the encyclopedia yourself, rather than demanding more from other Wikipedians?
12. Yes, I could have discussed FDA nonapproval in the first paragraph rather than the second. Or I could have put it in a third paragraph. I just chose to put it next to existing information on the health effects of TTM. You're extrapolating too much from menial details based on your assumptions about my politics. Stop it. Quigley (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I'll post here (rather than on you talk page, as my last comment there was deleted) a factual answer to your "review of facts":

1. Even though my tone might not please you, I have always been factual, raising precise objections regarding certain of your edits.
2. I have refrain to respond to many of your accusations of personal nature (" conspiracy theory", "insulting and inflammatory language", "making bad generalization", "raise up a lynch mob", "bad generalization", "trolling", "harassment and intimidation", "hatred", ), trying to keep civility in our discussions.
3. "though curiously excluding the ones where I did unambiguous good, like removing blatant copyright violations". This is simply not true. You have made a total of four edits over the last 12 months, I mentioned all three that are accessible. I could not mention the fourth edit you did on 25 April 2011, as it is part of one of the eight edits by different contributors which have been removed from the public archives.
4. You are qualifying my involvement in this article as "incongruous", due to my "self-proclaimed interests and contribution history are a single-purpose mountaineering account". First I think this remark denigrating a priori an editor competencies or interest for a topic is highly disrespectful. Second if you watch a bit more carefully at my contribution history, you will notice that my account was not created to edit mountaineering issues as you proclaimed: during the first three months period after I created my account in the English Wikipedia on 29 July 2010, I made 13 contributions on articles pages, 8 were on lakes pages, 2 on mountain range pages(editing lake section), 1 on pass page (editing road issue), 1 on a mountain page (editing content related to a lake) and 1 on a mountain list page (inserting the official name used in China). None of these early edits deal with mountaineering. Finally about my "self-proclaimed interests" in mountaineering, you may have noticed that I discovered and joined the Wikiproject Mountains on 8 November 2011, after the start of the discussion on Shishapangma spelling, mentioning that my interest were in "geographic, socio-cultural and mountaineering aspects". There is more than mountaineering about mountains. You might know that most plants and minerals used in TTM medicine are collected in mountain areas.
5. Regarding your accusation that I "greatly personalize" issues during "our first interaction", your link is simply wrong. Our first interaction ever took place here, when you started two paragraphs in the talk page with "This is a terrible section title" and "You are confused". I answered you very politely here, and in our third interaction you raised concerns about Wikilawyering, to which another editor answered that "calling the current discussion wikilawyering is not helpful."
6. Regarding your accusations of "asking for help" in order to tag team you, I would like to say the following: I have asked the help of an admin in order to revert another controversial move (where you were not involved), and a senior editor with more than 38,000 edits proposed spontaneously to help me with "pagewatching". I replied him 3 days later accepting his offer, and our discussion, where I mentioned your name, was mainly focusing on WP:ENGLISH.
7. Regarding your allegation that I wanted to revert "ALL" your edits, please read again the text, I wrote "ALL THE CONTROVERSIAL EDITS". So far I have been doing it in about 5-10 cases, always very cautiously and explaining in detail the reasons for reverting.
8. "Picked fight"? I call this restoring WP quality based on existing policies. You replaced from the lead and the infobox the most used spelling form in English (99.6% of Google hits) by a much less common form (0.4%), which was already be given its due weight in the article. And if you look at the page history, you made the final edit by removing the common spelling from the infobox, which I did not dispute.
9. Sarcastic comment. Sure, the comment you refer to was slightly sarcastic, in response to your inflammatory comments and insistence to attribute me intentions or words I have never written.
10. About my recent language: I agree with you on this point, it was not the most appropriate formulation to repeat so many times "you" and "user.quigley". I will try to avoid this in future, and hope that it will be reciprocal. But I would like to point out that I have always remained factual, and I fully maintain my "conclusions".
11. A last point regarding the harassment accusations: please have a look at What harassment is not: "Neither is tracking a user's contributions for policy violations; the contribution logs exist for editorial and behavioral oversight." You are apparently also tracking my contributions, and I don't see any problem with you doing so.

"In a show of good faith, I will explain my reasoning for my edits, although I am not required to do so." I will ignore your additional personal attacks in the introductin of your last comment, but just would like to comment the sentence above: I haven't requested you to explain your reasoning for your edits. With my 12 points related to your last edit, I have explained why I reverted them, as per WP policies. I was inviting you to discuss the points I raised, would you wish to make some new modifications on the page.

May I answer your 12 points through your text (using the "interrupt" tag), or shall I do it separately? I'm not sure what will be the better etiquette, and I don't want to create another conflict, but for sure certain points need to be answered.--Pseudois (talk) 10:18, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

An example of selective use of references (see above section)

Using selectively the same sources (same pages), you can achieve the following opposite result:

Current version edited by user:Quigley: The exile Central Tibetan Administration has kept up the practise of Tibetan Medicine in India since 1961 when it established the Men-Tsee-Khang (the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute) in Dharamsala. Many backpackers and tourists from around the world come to Dharamsala to seek Tibetan herbal medicine. However, many of them end up seriously ill in conventional hospitals, because their belief in Tibetan medicine precluded early-stage allopathic treatment, like antibiotics, for simple ailments. In some cases, the accumulated mercury and other heavy metals in "Tibetan herbal pills" have caused acute renal failure and death. Tibetan herbal formulas have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In 1998, the 14th Dalai Lama hosted the First International Congress on Tibetan Medicine in Washington, D.C.

Alternative version using same sources: The Tibetan government-in-exile has kept up the practise of Tibetan Medicine in India since 1961 when it re-established the Men-Tsee-Khang (the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute).It now has 48 branch clinics in India and Nepal. During an opening address at an International Congress on Tibetan Medicine hold in 1998, the Dalai Lama explained that the first international congress on Tibetan medicine was hold in the 8th century, and that Tibetan medicine existed as an authentic healing tradition, internationally recognized for its effectiveness for more than a millennium. Experts have found out a highly creative integration of biomedicine or Western medicine with Tibetan medicine in recent years. This is especially evident at the Dharamsala Men-Tsee-Khang, where X-ray machines and stethoscopes are used side by side with pulse diagnosis. American Doctor MD Timothy H Holtz who worked at the Delek Hospital in Dharamsala delivering Western medicine stated that "Tibetan Medicine had much to offer patients suffering from chronic illness, beyond just chronic pain and mild psychiatric disorders", emphasizing that "an integrative approach was likely to produce the best results".

Current version edited by user:Quigley: A key objective of the government in Tibet is to promote traditional Tibetan medicine among the other ethnic groups in China. Once an esoteric monastic secret, the Tibet University of Traditional Tibetan Medicine and the Qinghai University Medical School now offer courses in the practice. In addition, Tibetologists from Tibet have traveled to European countries such as Spain to lecture on the topic. However, the Chinese government has also systematically introduced biomedicine (so-called Western medicine) into Tibet, such that in the Tibetan language, biomedicine is called "Chinese medicine" (Tibetan: རྒྱ་སྨན, Wylie: rgya sman) or "Communist medicine" (Tibetan: ཏང་སྨན, Wylie: tang sman).

Alternative version using same sources: In China, the government plans to further promote traditional Tibetan medicine to people from different ethnic backgrounds around the country and even outside China, in "a push to bring Tibetan medicine to the world". Tibetologists from Tibet have traveled to European countries such as Spain to lecture on the topic. As the leading Tibetan medicine research institute in China, the Beijing Tibetan Hospital issued completion certificates to 29 foreign students in May after providing a 10-day training program. Many of the patients do not seek conventional treatment, as exemplified by the history of Nimajiangcai, a Tibetan college lecturer in Yushu, who began suffering from gastroenteritis in 2002: "he did not go to a general hospital for help. Instead, he paid 100 yuan ($15) to a Tibetan doctor, who prescribed him herbal medicine and asked him to pray everyday". However, in some cases, the accumulated mercury and other heavy metals in "Tibetan herbal pills" have caused acute renal failure and death. Fake drugs is a widespread problem, and industry insiders estimate that over 90% of Tibetan drugs sold on the market are fake. A report quoting a drug administration official in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province said " there were about 40 manufacturers of fake Tibetan drugs in Qinghai and Gansu provinces". "However, authorities across the country still want to promote traditional medicine". In the US, Tibetan herbal formulas have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Needless to say that both versions are similarly biased.--Pseudois (talk) 20:18, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Your modified first version is self-defeating in that it tries to prove the efficacy of TTM by quoting people who say that say TTM could work—if it were used as an auxiliary treatment to treatments based on scientific evidence. I have no problem with mentioning that some TTM advocates try to "integrate" TTM and "Western" medicine, but these new approaches are ancillary to the fact that TTM is used by people who distrust, don't have access to, or want to avoid the conventional medical system—especially in Dharamsala, where tragic results have been documented. This is true inside Tibet, too, but there's no point in denying that the Chinese government both preserves TTM and promotes conventional medicine in Tibet on a wide scale.

See what I did there? I discussed the relative merits of different content versions, rather than attack you back or defend myself. This is what the talk page is supposed to be for. Quigley (talk) 23:36, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

This paragraph was a demonstration on how it is possible to biase references. I used exacly the same references as you (same pages), and stated clearly that I considered the "alternative" version as "similarly biased". I am not denying in any way the efforts by the Chinese goverment to promote Tibetan medicine. Your prose was unnecessarily politicizing a medical topic by presenting a good (China) and bad (Exile Tibetan community) way of practicing Tibetan Medicine. Other editors could have just written the exact opposite, and I consider both attempts as misleading and violating the spirit of WP NPOV.--Pseudois (talk) 07:18, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Again, you're making too many assumptions about my intent, and not proposing enough text that you would actually like to see in this article. I had only two short sentences about the role of the Chinese government in promoting both the traditional and conventional disciplines in that area. The lion's share of my information happened to come from Dharamsala, because more English-language literature was available about the practice of TTM there. Taken in isolation, you could have written equally effusive and skeptical accounts of the practice of pure TTM. But in the context of the article, less speculative praise of TTM and more discussion of patient outcomes (both positive and negative) is required for balance. Quigley (talk) 17:28, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Weaknesses of the article

Nothing is said about the actual content of TTM. Just some sketchy (and not understandable to the general reader) hints about its fundamental theory. There is much more to say also on this issue. Nothing about the the theory of therapy. Nothing about the herbs, their combination into formulae and the clinical use of these. Nothing on the origin of the fundamental theory (which is btw obviously the ayurvedic). Are the TTM formulae identical to the ayurvedic or are they different? In what do they differ?

As in other articles on Asian trad. medicines it looks the edtors are lost in the endless, silly polemic on whether they are proven scientifically either effective or harmful. What about writing on some of the great clinical experience accumulated by famous traditional doctors over the centuries in treating liver, kidney, heart, circulation deseases and on thier also famous formulae? (e. g. 25, 70 tastes pearl pill for one).

Any informed person can see TTM is in its essence an adaptation of ayurveda with the addition of local traditional lore about local (highland) herbs. I am not able to compare the formulae of the two though but someone else must do this.Aldrasto11 (talk) 05:34, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

The categorization of Traditional Tibetan medicine as a form of "alternative medicine" or pseudoscience completely invalidates and overlooks its history as one of the oldest medical systems in the world, and undercuts efforts to analyze the veracity of TTMs biomedical properties. Tawni Tidwell's work on the pharmaceutical effects of TTM's polyblend compounds would be an excellent addition to this article and is critical for unhinging it from a history of medical colonialism.

Tibetan Medicine: Illustrated in Original Text

http://books.google.com/books?id=GLSm9Rwa474C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Title Tibetan Medicine: Illustrated in Original Text California paperback, CAL 320 Volume 24 of Wellcome institute of the history of medicine / Publ. New series Volume 24 of Publications of the Wellcome Institute of the History of medicine: New series Translated by Rechung Rinpoche Edition reprint Publisher University of California Press, 1973 ISBN 0520030486, 9780520030480 Length 340 pages Subjects History › Asia › General

Rajmaan (talk) 15:08, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Not all view points

The results of scientific investigations into this brach of alternative medicine should be included somewhere in this article, hence the "Not all points of view" tag for now. Karlpoppery (talk) 20:47, 23 April 2017 (UTC)