health insurance companies paying for acupuncture says a great deal about whether or not it works in practice.
Well, I never said it didn't work, just that it was BS. The placebo effect is a very real and powerful thing, and acupuncture works under that premise and that alone - this doesn't justify all the falsehood behind it giving people false hope and misunderstanding of the importance of real medicine.Here's a post I did about how negligence of this nature will and does historically end up with dead people including a girl who died at 26 after trusting acupuncture other forms of bloodletting until they realised it wasn't doing anything and it was too late for real treatment.
book on this subject is called Spark in the Machine,,,the piezoelectric properties of the collagen component of the organic fascia tissue
I will indeed pay attention to this and perhaps write a post about it in the next episode or the one after, whichever makes sense, no space in a comment to dig into such things!
All the really effective drugs we have are analogs of naturally occurring treatments
The difference is TCM on the whole has been born from simple and primitive trial and error, which as we know in our own western Victorian times and beyond has horrible results. China has certainly killed far more than it has saved over the millennia trying out various concoctions of poison based on the logic of 'fire beats fire'.
The difference with actual medicine is that we first test and understand, then isolate the active component, make it safe, test it repeatedly and release - all through legitimate scientific method.
None of that is applied to TCM (In fact it's sold not as medicine, allowing it to go around numerous safety loopholes)
So sure some TCM after killing millions of people comes out positive, but it takes modern medicine and researchers to understand why and maximise its potential and manufacture alternatives and so on, without a single death (usually).
that's the best explanation I've seen for why acupuncture works.
The best explanation to me is the placebo effect. It's a great painkiller but, like chiropody, it's a temporary band-aid in more chronic cases and conditions that go beyond just 'pain relief'. Placebo DOES do this, and sometimes it CAN help you fight certain low level infections or disease - but this is because your body is already capable of doing this on its own in the right state.
Give yourself a bit of cancer, diabetes, HIV, meningitis, alzheimers, TB, Cholera, Polio etc and you'll dull the pain right up until your death a week later.
Yet China claims this and the rest of TCM have no less than a 95% average success of curing such things in their 'studies'.
If research scientists can't corroborate this effect - its because they don't really want to
On the contrary, All the research is extremely biased towards TCM across all of Asia, India and so forth and in some cases in the west too. It's when you actually dig into the study yourself and start picking it apart you really get to see the hidden turds within.
Anyway as I said I may add a post with your recommendation, cheers for that =)
So you're saying my health insurance company pays $80/week for a placebo. Nice. They just throw money around, don't they?
There is evidence of Qi energy. It's evident in the morphogenic force that drives cell division and specification. I really hope you look into this, and I'm following to make sure you do.
For what its worth, I was treated unsuccessfully with needles for sciatica, and I had paid cash. 5 years later the pain happened again, and I realized that acupuncture was covered by my insurance so I figured what the hell, give it a shot.
I had no expectations and I told no one. The next day my neighbor commented on how much 'straighter I was standing'.
In addition to back pain, I've had asthma and stomach issues treated with noticeable, but temporary effects. Besides this experience I've had my Basset Hound treated for back pain and it worked like the movies. That's the only reason I ever paid for my first treatment - because I saw it work on my dog. Those $50 treatments for him were worth every penny.
I always thought it was bullshit, too until I saw the real-world effects. I know it's flaky, and that's why I looked into it. Now I have an answer and I'm sharing it with you.
Piezoelectric qualities of collagen in the organic fascia tissue - that's what the needles act upon. Fascia forms a network of sorts throughout the body and when the intersecting points are stimulated there are beneficial results. This much we already know.
If you and I had our own lab, I guarantee we could figure this all out in a few months, but where would it lead us philosophically? We might discover that we're more than a lucky collection of matter devoid of any 'spiritual' component. We might just discover that we share this 'non-material component' with animals and that would upset people on both sides of the scientific fence.
edit: I just remembered when the practitioner stuck a needle in the fleshy part of the earlobe my sinuses opened and drained immediately. I could hear and feel it happen. It was unmistakable and unexpected. She was treating stress/anxiety on that visit. Definitely not a placebo effect.
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