298 A cognitive and epistemological review This architectonic similarity is consistent with Paul Unschuld’s view that the alleged dichotomy between Western and Chinese notions of disease is completely unfounded. Nonetheless, Chinese Medicine is widely flourishing in the US and in Europe with the claim of being a unique, independent and comprehensive medical system based on alleged cognitive modalities ‘completely foreign to the West’ (1,4). In the US alone, approximately 20,000 non-physician practitioners are licensed in over 40 states, and some deliver primary care, with insufficient training in modern health sciences, and with the reliance on ancient metaphysics, anachronous notions of health and disease, and a rudimentary and symptomological nosology (38). As for the prospect of an epistemological rupture with elementary cognitive models, and a paradigm shift that would lead to a firm biological basis for the testable remedies in such empirical medicines (39,40), one shall recall the words of Thomas Kuhn in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: ‘There are many fields — I shall call them proto- sciences — in which practice does generate testable conclusions but which nevertheless resem- ble philosophy and the arts rather than the established sciences in their developmental pat- terns. I think, for example, of fields like chemistry and electricity before the mid-eighteenth century, of the study of heredity and phylogeny before the mid-nineteenth, or of many of the social sciences today. In these fields, too, though they satisfy Sir Karl’s demarcation criterion, incessant criticism and continual striving for a fresh start are primary forces, and need to be’ (41). 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