From evidence-based traditional Chinese medicine to digital-intelligent traditional Chinese medicine: a focus on standards evaluating the clinical efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine

The difficulty in defining the ambiguous “natural language” within the theoretical system of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the dynamic evaluation and individual differences of treatment based on syndrome differentiation, as well as “hard-to-quantify” characteristics of subjectiveness in the evaluation of treatment efficacy during the treatment, has resulted in the questioning and limited use of various TCM therapies with extensive application in clinical practice, which also arises from the lack of recognized and scientific evaluation methods. The standards evaluating the clinical efficacy of TCM remain the key bottleneck restricting the modernization and internationalization of TCM. Although the concept of evidence-based medicine was introduced into the field of TCM and applied to the evaluation and exploration of the clinical efficacy of TCM, there is still a lack of systematic methodological tools for its applicability evaluation. The concept of “digital-intelligent TCM” provides a new direction for the exploration of TCM based on the scientific and technological background of the times. It is not antagonistic to evidence-based TCM; instead, it complements and prompts evidence-based TCM to jointly accelerate the standardization of the evaluation of the clinical efficacy of TCM.