Do medical schools in China incorporate traditional Chinese medicine into their subject matter?
It seems to me that many of the traditional Chinese approaches such as acupuncture, acupressure, herbal medicine and diagnostic techniques have a lot of merit. Probably they have scientific justification as well, even if it has yet to be fully explained. It would be a shame if it all were to be lost to many of the myths of modern medicine.
You will be happy to know that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is thriving in China. Most provinces have their own TCM university. I used to live nearby to the TCM university/hospital in Anhui Province and would occasionally get acupuncture and other treatments. The hospitals can be very packed with patients because quite a large number of people in China turn to TCM first for more routine illnesses.
Most hospitals in China are what we would think of as Western medicine. However each time my wife or I have been to a western style hospital part of the prescription has always included a traditional medicine component. Since even doctors trained in Western medicine also prescribe TCM medicines I believe there must be some TCM principles taught in Western medical schools.
The Chinese may not have developed what we think of as science on their own, but they certainly came darn close. They were meticulous observers and experimenters in the past. In developing acupuncture they amassed tons of information and made elaborate statues that had hundreds of pressure points. Chinese thinkers also experimented a lot with different kinds of foods to see how they influence the body and mind. For instance, in the late 1800s the Chinese had identified that carrots are good for the eyes and vision (decades before the discovery of beta carotene).
In short, TCM is not being lost as people in China and increasingly people in the West are keeping it alive. While TCM might not be strictly scientific it was developed through millennium of observation and experimentation and should be respected as more than mere “anecdote”.