New software combines ancient Chinese practices and modern medicine to measure health by analysing images of the tongue – specifically its colour and coating.
The appearance of the tongue is one of the measures used to classify the overall physical status of the body, or “zheng”.
In the future, people should be able to access this tool via webcams and smartphones, providing a kind of early-warning system.
Kelly O'Neill
Journalist
Please spare us this crap.
The "research" doesn't mention randomised or blind. In fact it says "it was more profitable to apply the feature vectors on the entire tongue image. When classifying the normal groups vs. the ZHENG groupings, usually, it improved classifier performance to apply the feature vectors to the middle tongue regions only."
Yeah right. We pick how to do it, we tell the allegedly smart software how to do it, and guess what, it does it.
Key word in the quote of course is "profitable". Alt med industry is huge and profits from ignorance. Pseudoscience babble dressed up in statistical nonsense doesn't cut the ice.
Do you have a scientist on board who can vet this crap for you?
And on one of your other articles the links lead to a website requiring subscription in order to read the research. Not a good look.
Congrats on trying to get a bit of science in your mag, but you've really got to do better.
Joel Mayes
Bicycle Mechanic
I hear the call of the Canard Noir