I don’t know if acupuncture works or not. However, a friend of mine was going to her acupuncturist and told me to come along to see about my allergies. I came, but I wasn’t really interested in trying it.
When I got there, I was actually shocked at how it was done. The acupuncturist didn’t clean the area where he was sticking the needles, and he didn’t wear surgical gloves. In fact, I don’t even remember him scrubbing.
At that point, I didn’t care if acupuncture gives you a five day orgasm. No one was going to stick anything in me with so little care towards modern hygiene. I don’t know if improperly flowing qi causes disease or not. We do know that bacteria and viruses do.
I talked to someone doing an MA that sent off £150, their star sign and a lock of their hair and got a sheet back delineating 70 things they were allergic to, including chocolate and flour. Good thing these kind people pointed it out, the hyperallergic person didn’t know why they were going into anaphylactic shock at least 5 times a day… :rolleyes:
Accupuncture has finally been tested by science and they admit it does work on some things. There are some quacks out there and science did not do thorough testing on every application. The article I read explained how it works also both chemically and electrically. You would think they would use sterilized needles though. Gloves would probably make it so they can’t feel the spot where to insert the needles though and being off by even a few centimeters will make their effort worthless. I think I saw that research on Science Daily just about a couple of months ago.:eek:
I just found the article the story was taken from. There is so much wrong with it. For example, the patents were divided into two groups:
[ul]
[li] Group A received acupuncture treatment[/li][li] Group B filled out surveys[/li][/ul]
What? Why didn’t they do sham acupuncture treatment on the second group? Why not at least pretend they’re getting some form of treatment instead of filling out paperwork?
All the study shows that unexplained pain was relieved when patients thought they were getting treated for it.
Acupuncture changes brain's perception and processing of pain, researchers find -- ScienceDaily. There are many reasons things can work, some work by belief and some by correcting electrical and chemical kaos. I understand how acupuncture basicly works based on electrical circuitry and connected nerves but you wouldn’t want me sticking needles in you. There are people who know what they are doing and there are those who say what they are doing. I cannot make a recommendation on this subject but understand that it can work to relieve at least symptoms of things and releaving the symptoms can sometimes allow the body to heal itself. You’re also lucky that I overshot a timeframe on my original article which went indept on this subject and I couldn’t post it and had to re-log-in. It would have bored everyone with detail.
Uh, that study cannot be said to be valid at all. In order to control for demand characteristics they’d have to compare “trained acupuncturists” and confederates randomly sticking needles into people’s bodies, or some other form of pain relief.
Watch this interview which talks about medical controls.
You can’t discount something because you cannot figure out how it works. I know science will not try to figure out how something works if they can’t percieve it because of their limited knowledge. What happened to inocent(real) until proven guilty(unreal). Consensus is that things aren’t real until proven real by someone with credentials. Cougers didn’t exist here till two years ago in the Upper Peninsula till there was evidence by someone getting a picture of one on a trail cam. All the people who saw them were considered not knowledgeable or discredited previously. Now there are many confirmed sightings. The cougars were real and here for many years even though the DNR said regular people’s perception was not reliable evidence. If there’s a big cat in you’re yard with a long tail that looks like a cougar or mountain lion on TV, it’s not a bobcat.
The concept in science is the exact opposite: parsimony. Nothing is assumed, the minimum the evidence accounts for is accepted. Credentials are an appeal to authority, the evidence can come from any source provided they have adequate controls. The study you provided did not have adequate controls to demonstrate an effect. Scientists constantly try to provide evidence and disprove theories in order to progress: should acupuncture work, it wouldn’t be a calamity for medicine or science, they’d try to adopt it and provide a working model for why it works. In the few instances where it can be said to have an effect (unknown symptoms), it has been put into practice. There isn’t some great entity blocking progress because it is foreign and weird, there is just rational scepticism. Otherwise we’d be stuck with snake oil and leeches.
Let’s see, snake oil is cumadin for blood thinning which requires periodic blood testing.Blood letting is necessary treatment for some who have disorders and sometimes if the symptoms are there the doctor may send you to the lab for blood tests and you start to feel better. Many Doctors are very aware of this. These things have been incorporated into our medicines. Most medicines that are presently being used are from checking out the medicinal plants and practices of our ancestors. The problem is that when we sense the presence of these medicines we sometimes create the chemicals to take apart the plant and those extra enzymes slowly start poisoning us.
You should take your post and inset it into a post ten times longer. Then take a portion of that post and insert it into a post ten times longer than that. Repeated several times it makes the stupid even stronger.
Sometimes when our bodies sense chemicals present in plants that we or our ancestors have eaten our bodies create enzymes or chemicals needed to digest and neutralize these chemical reactions for the whole plant. It’s something to do with turning switches on and off on our genes. The chemicals our bodies create then cause problems. To put it in an easy to understand example. You’re wife tells you you are having spagetti for supper when you leave to work. When you come home you’re wife has fish for supper. All day you’re body has been creating chemicals to take apart the spagetti and most of these enzymes are different than you need for fish so they roam around and cause kaos in you’re body. The fish doesn’t taste good then. If you’re used to you’re wife changing her mind than you will subconsciously know not to plan on what she told you and you will not create enzymes. If you are smelling something and eat something else you can wind up creating wrong chemicals also. There is a lot more to this than I am trying to explain but I’m trying to keep it simple.
This makes it sound as if “science” is the name of an organization.
Were double-blind studies done? Was this published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Do you know what the terms “double-blind” and/or “peer-reviewed” mean?
This is true. One time I was looking forward all day to having sex with my wife, but that night she said she was tired and asked if she could just give me a blowjob instead. Not only did I not enjoy it, it was like stuffing my dick into a burlap sock full of thistles!
I wasn’t discounting acupuncture because how it works hasn’t been figured out. I was questioning your claim that you knew how it worked based on the lack of credible scientific hypotheses for how it works.
Real until proven unreal is a fool’s game. There are beautiful fairy women* in the woods near my home, prove them unreal why don’t you?
*They do have cow’s tails, but you can’t get everything you want now, can you.
There are many different sciences. Archeology, Paleontology, medicine, Physics, Mathamatics, etc… When you study a science you are taught to think in a certain way and when you get you’re degree you are expected to join in that scientific community and see things their way. If you do not see things the same way as the community you will get discredited. That’s human nature. Police are trained in acadamies to think alike. We are all conditioned to think like the members of the organizations we belong to. It’s not a bad thing, but it does cause conflict and it also slows progression of mankinds intelligence. We’re moving a little fast anyway. I’m sure that the Radiological Society of North America knows the right procedure for doing testing and I’m sure they wouldn’t release info like that without being sure. I don’t usually question evidence but I have learned to question the interpretations of evidence.
I have no comment on you’re comparison Vinyl