Quote from Scarecrow

re: uni, you all know i'm doing chinese medicine by now

Chinese medicine is quite effective I must say, but then comes acupuncture and kicks it's ass.
It surprises me a lot of how much acupuncture is effective.

Quote from devi

Chinese medicine is quite effective I must say, but then comes acupuncture and kicks it's ass.
It surprises me a lot of how much acupuncture is effective.

acupuncture is a part of chinese medicine and in fact originated in it. i am learning acupuncture also.

Quote from Gyohdon

Most courses I know of start you off with Java

Very true, still using Java now ._.

Quote from Scarecrow

acupuncture is a part of chinese medicine and in fact originated in it. i am learning acupuncture also.

It quite amazes me how needles can make a person feel better.
You got any explanation why perchance?

Quote from devi

It quite amazes me how needles can make a person feel better.
You got any explanation why perchance?

you can think of acupuncture points as little adjusting dials on the body that can be used to help balance out the system's functions. if everything is set at the right levels, everything runs smoothly and the person feels good. if something is wound up too tight, or isn't activated enough, it can cause problems at a deeper level; similarly, if there is a problem deeper in the body, it will cause things to tighten up or get flimsy. acupuncture needles are like a tool to interact with those dials, to put them back to their optimal position.

in chinese medicine terms it becomes easier to understand, but there are underlying concepts and theories that you need to know and i can't be bothered explaining them all (it's been one year of work for me so far).

a very rough explanation: needles stimulate awareness and blood flow to the area, influencing nearby muscle groups. this causes changes that reach further into the body, mapped out by pathways of energy flow called meridians, which intersect at certain points and connect with certain organs to produce certain effects depending on where you put the needle. if you needle the right point in the right way after diagnosing the right condition, this will make the person feel better.

Quote from devi

Chinese medicine is quite effective I must say, but then comes acupuncture and kicks it's ass.
It surprises me a lot of how much acupuncture is effective.

Time and time again, studies have proven accupunture to be nothing more than another pseudo medicine.

As with religion, we ask one simple thing, satisfy your burden of proof. Yet time and time again, superstitious people fail to reject the null hypothesis.

As of yet, any beneficial symptoms of acupuncture have shown to be nothing more than a placebo and/or regression to the mean (you would have got better whether you took the therapy or not).

I find little value in placebos. They only effect the way we interpret pain and nausea. The underlying problem is never fixed. Leave that to real medicine. That being said, if you want to spend your own hard earned money for a placebo and a brief respite, be my guest. But don't claim that acupuncture actually works, because it doesn't.

There's no such thing as alternative medicine. There's medicine, and there's pseudo medicine. Either you solve the problem, or you don't.

searched around for a decent read: http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6060

Quote from Cronos

Time and time again, studies have proven accupunture to be nothing more than another pseudo medicine.

As with religion, we ask one simple thing, satisfy your burden of proof. Yet time and time again, superstitious people fail to reject the null hypothesis.

As of yet, any beneficial symptoms of acupuncture have shown to be nothing more than a placebo and/or regression to the mean (you would have got better whether you took the therapy or not).

I find little value in placebos. They only effect the way we interpret pain and nausea. The underlying problem is never fixed. Leave that to real medicine. That being said, if you want to spend your own hard earned money for a placebo and a brief respite, be my guest. But don't claim that acupuncture actually works, because it doesn't.

There's no such thing as alternative medicine. There's medicine, and there's pseudo medicine. Either you solve the problem, or you don't.

that's the most narrow-minded thing i've ever heard you say man. i'm disappointed in you.

aside from the point that there are actually hundreds of studies showing that acupuncture is effective... the reason acupuncture generally has sub-par perfermance in clinical trials is that there is no one set of points that can be applied to any group of different people, even if they have the same condition. everybody's constituation varies, and as i mentioned in my other post you need to be very specific about which points you use for which person. trials organized where, for example, a set of points are used to treat a variety of people who have asthma, are meaningless because of this.

pharmacological medicine works to a certain extent, but in most cases does as much harm as it does good. antibiotics for example, can destroy an infection. but at what cost? at the same time you're losing billions of probiotics which your body requires to process food and energy intake. for an acute case, maybe it will be best to take antibiotics to get rid of the infection quickly. but if you have a recurring infection, you need to root out the cause, rather than just taking antibiotics for months on end. this is where western medicine falls short.

it focuses on symptoms and acute conditions. it doesn't know anything about deeper causes and chronic illnesses. that's where you need to try a different approach. chinese medicine does exactly that.

do you know what they prescribe for my condition in western medicine? for fibromyalgia causing chronic pain and fatigue? they prescribe anti-depressants. because they don't know what's wrong and this usually makes people depressed, exascerbating their symptoms. chinese medicine looks at the root cause of the illness; poor digestive function leading to poor energy production and insufficient blood volume, causing pain. it prescribes dietary advice, gentle exercise, herbal medicine to support digestive function, and acupuncture to relieve pain. which sounds more sensible to you?

People say placebo like it's a bad thing. Even if acupuncture scientifically does nothing, as an activator of the placebo effect it has it's uses. For example, if the chronic pain from Scarecrow's fibromyalgia is reduced or eliminated through the placebo effect activated from acupuncture, is that not a good thing? Considering the drugs you'd have to take otherwise to accomplish the same goal have their side effects, accomplishing that task without them seems like a more optimal approach. A lot of medical conditions don't have cures, so you treat the symptoms to cope with the condition until a cure is found. As long as the end result is the same (such as alleviating pain), why does it matter that you throw pills at it instead of the placebo effect?

Certainly isn't narrow minded Scarecrow. I'm saying there is no legitimate evidence to suggest that acupuncture works as anything other than a placebo. If it tricks you into thinking you're better, than that's a good thing. But don't confuse that with actually fixing the underlying problem. And opinion based on evidence that doesn't correlate with your own isn't narrow mindedness.

Alas, we both have our sources of evidence, and we could argue until the cows come home.

I know someone who can only achieve neck pain relief by going to her acupuncturist. She'll get these spasms and go to a chiropractor, see a massage therapist. But the only thing that actually stops the spasms for her is the acupuncture. And that's not all in her head or whatever. That's just ridiculous and is a case of refusing to see that it's harder to prove the benefits of some alternative medicines but that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. We are continually learning new things about our bodies and about science and life as we know it so it's so close minded when people disregard something because it doesn't stack up on paper.

People used to feel that way about meditation. It was hokey to some people. But now that we can actually watch the brain changing during meditation, it can now be proven that meditation has excellent benefits in so many aspects. We wouldn't be able to measure it's use before because we didn't have the technology to prove how great it was. We always look back and laugh at the people who thought something was impossible just cause it didn't calculate scientifically at that moment.

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Quote from Hewitt

Refusal to accept one or the other simply because they're "different" could lead to ineffective blindness.

i maintain that western medicine is generally more effective when immediate results are needed; for example in acute conditions or when surgery is needed; that is, for more superficial conditions.

chinese medicine is more effective for chronic conditions and prevention of illness, working on the constitutional level of an individual.

I think the discussion isn't so much about Chinese/western as it is about scientifically validated/non-validated (there's plenty of examples of Chinese medicine that have scientific reasons for working). That being said, I never said acupuncture doesn't work. I said, thus far, it hasn't been shown to have any beneficial outcomes other than a placebo. I am open to it being proven in the future, if that's the case. From what I am read (and my personal experiences, which is a much less valid form of evidence), current experiments have proven the contrary (hence my position).

Firefly, I can't see why meditation could possibly not have beneficial effects.

Quote from Cronos

I think the discussion isn't so much about Chinese/western as it is about scientifically validated/non-validated (there's plenty of examples of Chinese medicine that have scientific reasons for working). That being said, I never said acupuncture doesn't work. I said, thus far, it hasn't been shown using the western scientific method that was developed to evaluate a completely different approach to health science to have any beneficial outcomes other than a placebo. I am open to it being proven in the future, if that's the case. From what I am read (and my personal experiences, which is a much less valid form of evidence), current experiments have proven the contrary (hence my position).

Firefly, I can't see why meditation could possibly not have beneficial effects.

let me fix that for you

Yes, and that western scientific method happens to actually work. The scientific method wasn't developed to evaluate an 'approach' to health science. It's inherently suitable for evaluating all approaches.