Tu's Nobel not an achievement of the TCM

Chinese scientist Tu Youyou, together with Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura, won the 2015 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. While it marks the international recognition of the country's scientific accomplishments, some people have wrongfully attributed Tu's feat to Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Admittedly, Tu won the prize mainly for her success in obtaining the pure substance of qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin (now a standard drug for malaria) from sweet wormwood, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine. But since its extraction method is poles apart from the typical TCM methodology of mixing various herbals, it can hardly be seen as an achievement of TCM.

In other words, TCM practitioners may still use dried sweet wormwood to treat malaria patients today, but few of them would consider using artemisinin.