Right, when life expectancy was what 40yrs?
Modern Medicine is what we've been introduced to since the last 100-200yrs depending on your definition of when that is.
Just because the words ancient, traditional are in the words doesn't give them much credit especially when your talking about quality of life and health.
Walk into a Chinese traditional medicine shop and walk past
whale ground penis powder and all these other interesting, odd powders, liquids, etc.. And ask the sales person what to give you for stomach pains. Go to 10 different stores, expect many different responses.
Do people not think attempts have been made to test claims made by ancient herbal remedies? There's a gold mine of profit to be made if companies can figure out if these work and then go out and make money from it.
A great deal of research and money is put into finding out new uses from newly discovered plants, insects, etc from all around the world.
I don't get what is a purist by wanting to see evidence that something works, we can test to see if something has an affect beyond placebo based on statistics, double blind tests, etc. Like Photon says even if we can't explain the efficacy of it, we can see the results without understanding why.