Incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) into a Western Medical Practice: A Case Study

The goal of this study was to provide some guidance on how western medical practitioners can incorporate
artificial intelligence (AI) and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into their medical practice. Artificial
intelligence has become an increasingly popular adjunct to medical practices in recent years and will probably
be used even more frequently in the years to come. It has an increasingly large number of applications to a
wide range of medical specialties and can make medical practices more efficient in operation and can also
aid in medical research. Two chatbots, Microsoft Copilot and Elicit were used to demonstrate how AI can be
used in medical research. The first step was to find relevant research studies. The second step was to use AI to
summarize one of the research studies that had been published in a medical journal. The topic to be researched
was dawu (a.k.a. Da Wu), a set of qigong exercises, to see what kind of studies had been made of this tool of
traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). One relevant study was found. The PubMed database was then utilized to
find the article and Elicit was used to summarize the study’s findings. Elicit did a decent job of summarizing the
study’s findings, but the depth and detail were not adequate to satisfy the researcher, who then decided to read
the entire article in order to write up a more complete summary. The conclusion was that artificial intelligence
can be utilized as a tool of medical research, but it should only be the starting point of such research. It can be
used as a way to find and summarize relevant research, but AI has not yet developed sufficiently to go farther.
Human brains still must be used to carry the research beyond the initial stages.

Keywords: Dawu; Tai Chi; Qigong; Traditional Chinese Medicine; TCM; Artificial Intelligence; Elicit; Copilot