CHINA'S health minister's recent support for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) should probably help instill renewed confidence in TCM as a healing art.

Steadily eclipsed by Western medicine, this art is increasingly challenged to defend its existence on scientific terms.

"Studying sub-health conditions and chronic diseases by combining modern biological methods with the primitively simple and holistic TCM approach is ... a necessary trend as modern medicine upgrades and develops into a higher realm," said minister Chen Zhu.

Coming as it does from a Western-trained molecular immunologist who was once a barefoot doctor and who had conducted his doctorate and post-doctorate studies in France, the assessment carries special weight.

Chen contrasted Western medicine and TCM by viewing Chinese ink and wash side by side with Western painting, with the former vaguely suggestive while the latter rich in details.

He believes that there are many similarities between TCM concepts and modern life science.

Chen's attempt to rationalize TCM on scientific principles is salutary, but past experience shows that justifying TCM on scientific terms can be self-defeating, for it will be discovered sooner or later that Western medicine is infinitely more scientific than, thus more superior to, TCM.

Chen proves more helpful in drawing attention to the fragmentation of the medical system and the therapeutic process as Western medicine becomes increasingly specialized.

He adds that such fragmentation robs us of opportunities for early intervention otherwise possible with simpler methods.

Thus Chen is a advocate for effective Western medicine-TCM integration.

But the so-called integration often turns out to be a steady advance of Western medicine at the expense of TCM.

This is probably a foreseeable outcome, for the two approaches are so different in their philosophy on life that they are inherently incompatible. This truth is not lost on Ji Xianlin, one of the most revered classical scholars in China today.

"For me, the conclusion is apparent. First, it (the integration) is impossible; and second, it is unnecessary," he wrote in an essay.

He explained that this is because the two systems are based on two different modes of thought.