TCMClinicalReason-Bench: Can Language Models Reason from Pathogenesis to Prescription over Real-World Clinical Cases?

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) can generate clinical narratives that are insufficiently grounded in patient-specific evidence. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), errors can propagate from etiology and pathogenesis through syndrome diagnosis and treatment principles to prescription generation. We developed TCMClinicalReason-Bench using 2,000 multicenter electronic health record cases to distinguish case-grounded responses from fluent but unsupported diagnostic and therapeutic conclusions. Five general-purpose and two TCM-specific LLMs were evaluated in zero-shot settings. An evidence-constrained rubric assessed seven diagnostic and therapeutic components and three cross-block relations, allowing case-supported alternatives. Qwen3.7-Plus with TCM retrieval served as the automated judge, alongside parallel blinded ratings by five senior TCM clinicians on a 600-case subset. Structural completeness was nearly saturated (99.3-100.0%), but normalized content scores ranged from 40.7% to 54.1%. The five general-purpose models averaged 50.0%, versus 41.3% for the two smaller TCM-specific models. Cross-block logic consistency ranged from 60.8% to 66.8% and correlated moderately with content across cases (Pearson's r = 0.515-0.656). Deficits were greatest in prescription generation, prescription analysis, and symptom-guided modification. In judge stress testing on 100 independent cases, perturbation detection rates across the three relations were 57%, 56%, and 31%, with contradictions detected more reliably than omissions. Separating component quality from cross-block consistency localizes failures missed by endpoint and completeness metrics and identifies where clinician oversight remains necessary.