I just wanted to thank the OPer for bringing this up. I visited my aunt who is up to her head in this. I went to her “pharmacist” with her step-daughter and it seems quite ridiculous. It’s almost like she insists the “West” are just evil corporations who want to make money and make everyone else sick.
I vote that it’s (largely) a scam. If you can’t actually show progress in statistics, there’s no use taking it. Of course, it’s hard to definitely say what the truth is, and this is GD.
IMO, if sticking a needle at point X can demonstrate to alleviate problem Y, then that is a “cure.” Whether you want to explain how it works as balancing chi or reducing neurotransmitters from some nerve cluster is irrelevant.
The idea of chi might be psuedo-quackery(*), but if it works…
(* = “Psuedo” in the sense that the people who promote it thinks it works, and are not just trying to fleece the unsuspecting)
Put me in the ‘Western medicine’ camp all the way. To me, ‘Eastern medicine’ (which I read as Chinese accupuncture, herbal remedies, etc) is one step above faith healing…and that a short step. Certainly there are things to learn about herbal remedies…but then, much of our present day REAL medicine derives from the study of old European herbal remedies. Not like the Chinese had some kind of monopoly on such things. But where the Chinese kept their faith based ‘chi’ medicine going, the ‘West’ eventually moved on to something thats a bit more repeatable.
If accupuncture and herbal remedies (or crystals or dancing naked during a full moon) floats your boat, if you feel more ‘energy’ or just better doing them, then knock yourself out…for every day things, or even minor pain, it works at least as well as a sugar pill would. My sister would be thrilled…she has spent 4 years studying Chinese accupuncture and herbal medicine in Washington state and is a true believer (plus as she has her own practice now she could use the custom :)). Still, when it comes to something seriously wrong (or for simply getting your kid immunized against one of those disease things) hopefully you will be more intellegent than she is and actually go see a real doctor.
-XT
On the other hand, if some alternative treatment makes you feel better and it’s doing you no harm, why not use it? The placebo effect is some of the best medicine around and it’s cheap (assuming you find a cheap placebo).
I also wouldn’t throw traditional classification systems (humours, chi, ayurvedic dosas, etc.) too hard out the window. Like most other simple physiological classification systems (ecto/endo/mesomorphic body types, for example), they often identify groups of characteristics in a useful way. (For example, the dosa system holds that people who have “excess vata”, being thin, restless and active, often tend to be hyper and anxious and need to work on calm. “Excess kapha” types who are overweight and sluggish need vigorous exercise to stimulate them, and so on. Much of this is just common sense and observation, and is experientially valid.)
It’s when the traditional systems start to insist on marvelous curative powers based on metaphorical “correspondences” rather than actual testing that they lead people astray, IMO. (Of course, just because traditional systems can involve heavy amounts of superstition and useless remedies doesn’t mean that a lot of modern medicine isn’t also bad for you. Let’s not swing so far in the reverse direction that we unquestioningly worship modern medical and pharmaceutical methods, which undeniably have had some pretty spectacular screwups of their own.)
You are correct there. They are not dismissed, they are tested. If they are found to produce measurable effects, the study continues. If no effects are found that cannot be accounted for by things like the placebo effect, then they tend to be dismissed.
Actually, it has been studied. No measurable effects apart from placebo.
That is why things like accupuncture are not mainstream medicine. There are no effects that accupuncture consistently produces that cannot be accounted for by the placebo efffect and/or counter-irritation.
You are making (in my opinion) the wrong distinctions.
Medicine is not Western vs. Eastern anymore than it is herbal vs. chemical or ritualistic vs. scientific.
There are three categories of medical treatments.
[ul][li]Tested and found to be productive[/li][li]Tested and found to be unproductive[/li][li]Untested[/ul]Stuff like the ch’i falls under the heading of “Tested and found to be unproductive”. No effect has ever been demonstrated that cannot be fully accounted for by already known factors. [/li]
My familiarity with the concept of ch’i (ki in Japanese) comes mostly from martial arts training, but that is generally tied in with traditional Chinese medicine and moxibustion/accupuncture, as you mentioned earlier. Nobody can do anything attributable to chi’i that cannot be done without reference to the ch’i. Thus there is no evidence that the ch’i exists.
I have seen most of the ch’i-related stuff in the martial arts - “sticky hands” in tai-chi-ch’uan, aikido’s “unbendable arm”, etc. None of it is real, AFAIK. Accupuncture doesn’t seem to do much that placebos can’t do.
If you will forgive me an anecdote, I was training (in judo) back in my college days, and another gentleman was watching us (this was in college). He was wearing a gi, and we got to talking. He claimed that he was a practitioner of (IIRC) either hsing-i or ba qua. And he claimed that judo throws would not work against him because his ch’i would cause him to “stick to the floor” and make him unliftable.
Uh-huh.
So, of course, we had to square off. He tried a straight strike to the face. A quick block, I came in under the arm and did osotogari and juji-gatame. Then I let him up, and he said he wasn’t quite ready so his ch’i wasn’t flowing. So I let one of my brown belts have a go. He did a much more aggressive seoi-nage on our friend. Same results.
He then left, claiming his teacher would be able to bring it off. Maybe, but I need a bit more evidence before I would take his word for it.
Regards,
Shodan
I think there are some valid critisms of Western medicine. This doesn’t mean that it is wrong or that another system is better, but rather that we must admit that we do not have all the answers and must continue to strive.
For example, we arn’t so great at dealing with mental illness. We have some useful drugs, but how they are prescribed and what results we are looking for is still hit or miss. SSRIs are prescribed essentially randomly, and rarely provide theraputic effects for long. Many of our treatments for more intense problems are essentially heavy sedation (thorazine, etc.) that don’t really fix anything, they just make people less able to cause trouble. We still use shock thearapy, which nobody has an explaination for. Our diagnosis system is deeply flawed, with whole new legions of kids with ADD, and now variations on autism, and depressed, panic-attacky adults show up in numbers that make you think that humans are the most maladapted species on earth. And we have no useful definition of what we are trying to achieve- we will consider someone cured if they can go to work and do their job, even if they are deeply unhappy.
And yet people defend treatments that we know are flawed because to suggest that we might not have all the answers brings up too many ugly questions.
Then there are hospital-born infections, which are far more common than most people think. The main complaint of a lot of traditional Eastern medicine practitians (and I mean old Chinese ladies, not new agers) is that hospitals make you sicker. This is sometimes true.
We are often willing to sacrifice quality of life for health, and are only starting to consider quality of life as a factor in how we treat people. Nobody can say the drug companies arn’t a vat of evil, and will forsake researching less profitable drugs (esp. vaccines) for more popular high-priced drugs that will help mostly affluent Americans.
And, finally, I think that without all the mumbo-jumbo, it is important to look at the mind’s effect on health and how external factors (family, work, lifestyle) affect health. We all have a story of a grandparent that held off dying until they saw their grandkid, or someone that died within weeks of their spouces’s passing. There are a lot of very complicated things that affect our health that can’t be neatly summed up in a few bottles of pills.
Once again, I don’t advocate running to the nearest wholistic health center, which probably is a big scammer. But I do think we cannot let blind devotion get in the way of looking critically and meaningfully at the current medical paradigm.
Sort of off topic, but has anyone actually been put to death for either of these things?
It’s not practices that are rooted in ritual and religion, only things that are solely rooted in these things. Many modern medical treatment have come from observing what natural plants indigenous shamans/witchdoctors/etc. use to treat illness or other bioactive reasons and then testing the various chemical via the scientific method to see if they really work and to isolate the active ingredients. Modern medicine doesn’t avoid things used in traditional medicines, indeed they activly seek to use them to discover new (and often lucrative) cures, but they do insist that these cures be supported by empirical experiments.
even, I don’t think that anyone is arguing that modern medice can (or purports to be able) to cure everything, just that it is far more effective then traditional medicines. I would say this is as true for mental illness as for anything else.
I agree with everything Shodan said.
My hands… they aren’t getting any cleaner no matter how much I wash them!!!
I think this is the first time I’ve ever agreed with you for this many paragraphs in a row. I’m going to cehck and see if my wife put something in my tea. 
Of course there’s no reason why it must be analogous to your heliocentricity example at all - it might be more closely analogous to, say, the belief that mushrooms are planted in rings by faeries - which might have been believed for a while, but is now known to be bullshit.
There’s this thing called burden of proof - you don’t assume that the thing works until someone proves it doesn’t, you let the people making the extraordinary claims provide the extraordinary evidence to support them.
deena has a point in that your average American doctor is more likely to espouse a treatment with a long track record in America or Europe than one from the Far East.
You might say that the only proof that acupuncture works rests in years of anecdotal evidence. However, until the mid-1990s, the same could be said of aspirin.
One might say that herbal remedies from China may contain harmful chemicals that have not been tested. One look through Ruth Winter’s eye-opening reference book, The Consumer’s Guide to Food Additives reveals hundreds of things we put into our bodies daily whose only criteria for inclusion is that they are GRAS (generally regarded as safe) based on no one yet being able to show that someone died specifically from their presence.
Our standards are not always as we would have ourselves believe.
My wife suffered from sciatica all last year. Most of the painkillers her doctors gave her didn’t help much, and in desperation she skeptically went to an acupuncturist. She felt better for several days. Am I to tell her it was an illusion, as was her lack of reaction to clinically tested pharmaceuticals? It worked as advertised for her, which is the best you can say about many treatments.
Now, this cuts both ways. The acupuncturist also gave her a load of herbal remedies. One contained Aristolochic acid, which we found out was banned by the FDA a number of years ago, and had she taken the supplement for any appreciable length of time, could have permanently dissolved the fine structures in her kidneys.
Take everything with skepticism, but don’t deny the results you observe directly, either.
It’s enormously difficult and costly to prove a drug’s efficacy and safety. Even after years of trials and millions of dollars spent the medical community can still find itself surprised. Still, many people readily accept anecdotal evidence over controlled, methodical, scientific trials ("…worked great for my cousin Dwayne.") It doesn’t seem to matter to them that there’s a bit of a bias involved if the same person selling the drug is also the one doing the “studies” or that in many cases there aren’t any studies at all.
I don’t frustrate myself with trying to change anyone’s mind anymore, however. There will always be people who will base their beliefs on what the wish to be true rather reason and logic. It’s just fun for some people to self treat. The fact that they feel smarter by doing this, like they’ve figured out some secret the medical community has overloooked, just adds to the placebo affect.
Yeah, but that means precisely nothing in the light of subsequent testing that has now been carried out on both apsirin and acupuncture. It’s no use wishing for some kind of ‘head start’ - it’s sort of like crying “no fair! we used aspirin when nobody knew for sure if or how it worked, why can’t we use acupuncture, even though we’re sure it doesn’t?”
Cripes - Diogenes and MaxtheVool agreeing with me in the same thread.
Pardon me while I plotz. 
I had much the same discussion on the old Judo-L list serve some years ago. Judo is a modern martial art, and not very interested in stuff that doesn’t work. There was a lot of the magical thinking about ki/ch’i back in the nineteenth century regarding jujutsu.
But Jigoro Kano, who founded Kodokan judo, was an educator and a pragmatist. And the big event that put judo on the map was a tournament in 1888, judo vs. jujutsu. Judo won, and the mystical stuff sort of went by the wayside. Because it didn’t work.
It is a lot like the Ultimate Fighting Championship that started about ten years back. All the martial arts that put a lot of stock in ch’i and death touch stuff and so forth got a chance to show its stuff against the utterly practical art of Brazilian jujitsu. And mysticism got left. Because it didn’t work.
Evidence based medicine is like that. You think you got something - accupuncture, DSMO, herbals, whatever? Cool - let’s see what you got. If it doesn’t work, then there is nothing left to talk about.
Regards,
Shodan
The one thing that people are missing is a category of medicine that I’d call “historically validated” as opposed to scientifically validated. I think this is what some (NOT all) herbal remedies fall under. My prediction is that ginseng will be one of the first to be scientifically validated.
An example - If I am hiking through Borneo and come out of the jungle with a purple rash in star shapes all over my back and chest, and the local witch doctor takes one look and says (in Borneish) “no problem, seen it hundreds of times, chew on this root for a while”, in my book the advice of the guy with the bone in his nose gets equal respect as the Harvard researcher’s. Just because his remedy hasn’t been described in a Merck manual does not mean it is invalid.
Now, I am not saying that we shouldn’t try to understand the method of action, but it also doesn’t mean that I refuse to believe in its efficacy until the science has been done.
Well, no offense, but on what basis do you assume that the root is going to work? Because the guy with a bone in his nose says so?
Suppose he tells you to sacrifice a chicken to Oogooboogoo, the Dark Lord of Dental Appliances. Is there a basis to assume that this is invalid, whereas the root is OK?
Many medical conditions are self-limiting. It is entirely possible that the reason the witch doctor has seen so many rashes go away after chewing on a root is that the rash goes away no matter what you do. Since he has never done a scientific study of the root or the rash, he doesn’t know that. Neither would you, if you took his word for it.
What you are referring to as “historically validated” sounds a lot like anecdotal evidence - indicative, but hardly definitive.
What I am saying is that using reports of results is fine as a basis for investigation. Just not to assume something works because it is very old.
Regards,
Shodan
Who is it that is sure it doesn’t work?
NIH Report on Acupuncture and Osteoarthritis of the Knee, Dec 2004
Plus my wife’s personal experience. It’s good enough for me.
Now, acknowledging that a treatment works is not the same as validating whatever metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is claimed as the source of its efficacy. Nor does it render the treatment proper for all ills. If I like what acupuncture does for minor pain, that doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly going to believe it will cure me of cancer.
Nonsense
The atom bomb had a profound effect on Japan, but it didn’t destroyed the way of life Japan - the fire bombing did far more damage. The Meiji Restoration brought Japan into the twentieth century. This is when the samurai became businessmen and the kimono virtually disappeared. Ironically, it could be argued that in an effort to recapture what was lost during the war, Japan became Japanese once again.
Whoa, you just blew my mind. I’m freekin out!
Seriously though, please elaborate. I’m confused.
In 1853 Commodore Perry steamed into Japan on orders from President Fillmore. To make a long story short Japan began receiving the short end of the stick when it came to treaties with western powers as well as losing the sphere of influence they had in Asia. For a variety of reasons this led to a massive economic and social upheaval in Japan and rapid modernization that took them from a feudal society to being able to rival western powers militarily and economically within about 50 years. It’s difficult for us to comprehend just how much their society changed within such a few short years. Samurai ceased to hold power, peasants were conscripted into a centralized army, and nationalism became the norm rather then loyalty to an individual lord. "raditional clothing and practice was looked upon by many as a symbol of Japanese backwardness and western dress and behavior became lauded as superior.
I don’t know if losing the war saved Japan in a cultural sense. I’m not sure if the changes between 1853 and 1936 had stabalized or were still changing.
Marc