A Study on the Theoretical Boundaries and Falsifiability of Traditional Chinese Medicine under the Heaven-Human Systems Medicine Framework

DOI: 10.12201/bmr.202604.00099

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  Abstract: The scientific legitimacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has long been trapped in the impasse of the “falsifiability” debate. On one hand, the demarcation criterion based on Popperian falsificationism pushes TCM toward the status of “unfalsifiable pseudoscience.” On the other hand, defenders of TCM either resort to Feyerabendian pluralism to dissolve standards altogether, or attempt to “substantiate” TCM concepts to fit the reductionist verification paradigm—neither approach genuinely resolves the problem of TCM's theoretical boundaries. This paper, grounded in the “Sheng-Sheng Materialist Movement View,” proposes a theoretical boundary framework for “Heaven-Human Systems Medicine,” dividing TCM's theoretical boundaries into two levels: hard boundaries and soft boundaries. Hard boundaries include structural destruction (disintegration of form), extracorporeal substitution (migration of qi), and microscopic realization (the underlying carriers of qi)—these boundaries are determined by the ontological hierarchy of qi and are insurmountable. Soft boundaries include temporal windows and anatomical barriers, which can be pushed outward by advances in Western medical technology, yet such shifts simultaneously create new possibilities for “compensating form-damage with qi.” Within this framework, the paper further discusses the falsifiability of Heaven-Human Systems Medicine: the criticism of unfalsifiability often stems from mistaking an abstract relational framework for concrete empirical propositions. Heaven-Human Systems Medicine affirms the ontological commitment of “the primacy of relations over substances,” and its falsifiability resides not at the substantial level but at the relational level—using relational metrics such as “relational entropy,” “morphism intensity vectors,” and “recovery time constants” as units of verification. This framework provides new methodological principles for falsification design in TCM scientific experiments and opens a third path for defending TCM's scientific legitimacy: not rejecting falsifiability, but establishing falsification standards appropriate to a relational science.

  Key words: Heaven-Human Systems Medicine; Sheng-Sheng Materialist Movement View; theoretical boundaries; falsifiability; relational ontology

  Submit time: 8 May 2026

  Copyright: The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted biomedRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
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  1	2026-04-11	10.12201/bmr.202604.00099V1	Download

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