This is news? :-)
Whenever I see stuff about TCM being "vindicated" it's usually stuff like this, along the lines "we found a scientific basis for symptom X being alleviated by chemical C which is found in plant P and traditional medicine indeed suggests using P to treat X". And this article seems to basically be saying the same. Big whoop. It's no surprise that people over time figured out that certain plants might help with certain symptoms, and that later with better science we isolated the specific chemicals in those plants that drive such effects.
Saying this vindicates TCM is like saying chicken soup is vindicated as a cure for what ails you because it turns out that if you're sick it's good to get plenty of fluids and some protein from chicken and vitamins from vegetables.
What matters is not just whether something works, but how it works relative to alternatives, and what its cost/benefit ratio is. If you were living 1000 years ago maybe it made sense to chew willow bark or whatever, but now there's not really a reason to do that instead of just taking aspirin. If you want to eat extra garlic or whatever because it gives you a placebo effect, there's no harm in that, but if you're spending hundreds of dollars on bogus garlic supplements then maybe you're wasting your money.
There are a lot of folk remedies that are harmless in themselves, but their main harm comes when they induce people to reject real solutions.
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