acupuncture

[oddjob]

last night i was talking to a couple friends, and we got on the subject of acupuncture. i'm a complete skeptic when it comes to this stuff.

1 said he did acupuncture, and it cured his lactose intolerance. he claims he used to have to go to the hospital after consuming any dairy products, and now can have all he wants. i couldn't take him serious after he explained what went on. while he was getting the acupuncture, he had to hold a glass of milk in each hand, then couldn't be within 10ft of dairy for like 2 days or something.

now i started laughing, and made some kinda joke about the milk having a restraining order against him. but then the other friend said he also completely believes in acupuncture. this one really shocked me, as he doesnt' strike me as the type to believe in this stuff.

ok, who here believes this works, and if you've had success, tell me what ailment it cured. i'm considering giving it a try for some things, but i need some more convincing.

[DeuceKicker]

cliff notes at bottom

This sounds very much like the homeopathy hoodoo my ex-girlfriend is into. She would extend her arm out in front of her while holding a vial of the offending substance, and the witchdoctor would try to push her arm down (while applying a scientifically measured equal amount of pressure for each trial). If she could push it down she needed to be treated for it, which involved holding it in her hand while having a vibrating back massager run up and down her back a few times to direct the chi in some beneficial way. After that, she couldn't come in direct contact with it for 24 hours.

She got into it when a friend told her that she had all kinds of food allergies but was cured completely. My ex was allergic to citrus. Every time she drank orange juice it made her lips tingle and puff up slightly. After being 'treated', she claimed to no longer have any tingling. She certainly did start drinking a lot more orange juice after that, which left less for me and was probably a major contributing factor in our break-up.

I was initially skeptical, but was trying to be open-minded. What did it for me was when she took our daughter for a treatment. Our daughter was maybe one at the time, so having her hold a vial of something and stick her arm out straight wasn't going to happen. What they did was put the vial in her sock and have her sit on her mother's lap, then the mother did the arm thingie by proxy, on the theory that the chi from the baby would go through the mother (who was supposed to somehow be a blank chi-slate) and the doctor could tell the baby's reaction by the mother's reaction. After I gave my consend for one visit for baby, Mommy wanted me to come along, I think to try to convince me to try it for some things, but it had the opposite effect. Even my ex, who I guess didn't know exactly what they were going to do with baby, said it seemed pretty far-fetched.

The ex has a skin condition resulting from her pregnancy, and she's been going to this hoodoo doctor for three years now, with no improvement. The doctor has her convinced that it's because she has to be cured for a host of 'foundation' things, which almost everybody has some allergy to, before they can move on to the specific thing causing her skin condition. And of course, if she gets treated for something, when she goes back, the doctor is just as likely as not to tell her that she has to be re-treated because she didn't avoid contact with it for 24 hours or it didn't take for some other reason.

Another problem was that she didn't know beforehand what she was going to be treated for. The doctor had a big case full of vials of all kinds of minerals, compounds, etc... and would test half a dozen at a time and decide which to treat her for. So she would come home and I'd hand her the remote saying I was going to take the baby for a walk or whatever. The ex would take the remote from me then scream, "Oh no! I can't touch the remote, I'm being treated for plastics today! How could you be so stupid!" In hindsight, this kind of nonsense was probably more of a contributing factor to the break-up than the orange juice.

Here's probably my favorite story. She got mad at me for some minor thing I did very early in our relationship, and has always held it against me. So one day she announces to me that she's over it once and for all. It turned out that she went to a different hoodoo doc who treated her for the "mental pain" of her memory. She lay on the table and had to concentrate hard on what she was pissed about while he did a Captain Tom with the vibrating back massager (which is supposedly a very scientific, finely tuned chi mover-arounder, but just looks like something you'd pick up at Sharper Image). A number of months later, she brought it up during an argument. I said, "I thought you said you were over that." She threw some orange juice at me. This was a good thing, because I found out that my eyeballs are allergic to citrus, so I went in that weekend for a treatment. The next time someone throws citrus juice in my face I'll be immune.

Conclusion: I think a lot of it is really hoaky, and some of it just doesn't even begin to pass a common-sense test. I can't say for certain that there isn't an energy flowing through our bodies that modern scientific equipment can't detect (but that some Chinese dude 3000 years ago, who didn't know enough to wash his hands after handling pig feces, somehow detected and was able to map as it coursed through the body). But my suspicion is that many of the cures we hear about are the Placebo Effect.

On the other hand, if your mind gets tricked into thinking you've been cured, and it stops the symptoms, does it really matter?

Cliff Notes: Grow up. If you need cliff notes on a message board you're not the kind of person I'm interested in conversing with, anyway.

[kerowo]

[ QUOTE ]
cliff notes at bottom

...tl;dr

Cliff Notes: Grow up. If you need cliff notes on a message board you're not the kind of person I'm interested in conversing with, anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ban please

[Blarg]

Homeopathy is horrifyingly stupid. It makes astrology look sensible by comparison. People who believe in this stuff may be somewhat okay in many regards, but they still give me the creeps. Being this stupid is grounds for divorce. I might not be able to look the person square in the eye anymore without giving away my disappointment and disrespect, and it would make all their other decisions and behaviors suspect. Wondering where and when the idiocy was going to work its way into her life, and mine, would be like watching a bomb ticking.

Acupuncture I have an open mind about.

[skunkworks]

Homeopathy is old news, babycakes.

I highly recommend power crystals, as endorsed by supermodel and humanitarian Namoi Campbell.

[Skipbidder]

[ QUOTE ]
Homeopathy is horrifyingly stupid...
Acupuncture I have an open mind about.

[/ QUOTE ]

The theory behind acupuncture is not much less silly than that behind homeopathy. Magical forces that have never been able to be measured travel in the human body along pathways that cannot be seen any living or dead specimens even with modern imaging modalities.

[Blarg]

I still remember 60 minutes' report showing patients getting surgery while under the anesthesia of acupuncture. This was widely accepted at the time and wound up being instrumental in getting acupuncture much more credit around the world and even in the American medical community. To the extent that, say, insurance companies will sometimes pay for acupuncture treatments and they can be included as treatments defendants must pay for in lawsuits. The same hasn't happened with, say, astrology, or, as far as I know, homeopathy. At least according to the treatment recommendations I've read.

Now a rebuttal of sorts has come down that people who undergo surgery with only acupuncture to block the pain simply have higher pain tolerances than usual. This strikes me as at least as unbelievable as that acunpuncture sometimes works.

The reason I keep an open mind is that some of acupuncture's claims seem more legit than others. Unfortunately, it also gets combined in practice with everything from sexual massage parlors to stuff like homeopathy and whatever else the market of suckers will bear. Because it veers pretty solidly over into the realm of the spooky and potentially into hogwash, it seems to accrete weirdness to it like a snowball picking up trash going downhill. So I don't automatically figure everything in acupuncture is worthwhile or that all the baloney that shady practicioners pull in on top of it is worthwhile either. But I am interested in the things that might work. If there's a less than spooky explanation for any of it, I'd prefer it to any mumbo-jumbo. But things like blocking nerve impulses -- perhaps there is something to that. I know I couldn't skip anesthesia while surgeons rooted around in my guts, and find it hard to believe virtually anyone else on the planet could either.

[george w]

my gf is going to school for acupuncture. not sure how real it is but i do know that they heal people.

[tdarko]

oddjob,

I have an extremely open mind when it comes to this stuff. I have used traditional Chinese medicine in the past and a lot in my life and I was actually seeing an herbalist for awhile b/c of some chronic injuries. He alleviated my pain.

Last summer I hurt my back pretty badly. I use a chiropractor and believe in this as well (that is for another thread) but I wanted to do more to speed up my recovery process b/c it was needed. I decided to try acupuncture. I ended up going twice and realized that it just wasn't for me. My result was that it didn't do anything.

Also, Blarg is right, homeopathy is nuts!

[dasein]

This has been studied. For most things it has not been shown to exceed the placebo effect. There are a handful of things that it has been shown to be effective for.