I still have a sick friend to help, so I may not be back until tomorrow. But, this being the weekend, I thought I'd ask a non-political question.
What do you folks think of acupuncture?
My friend has been in intractable pain for 11 years. I cannot describe the whys or hows or wheres of the matter; suffice it to say that he has spent his fortune -- nearly pauperized himself -- consulting the best medical advice this nation has to offer. After a certain point, all the doctors know how to do is to hand out pills. My friend now takes enough pain meds to fell a rhino -- and this massive drug intake has, in turn, done horrible things to his insides.
I took him to see an acupuncturist who, in the past, had performed miraculously for my brother.
This healer is a wonderful woman with some well-known clients. While at her small clinic, I saw a man whose name you would know; this was, I believe, his first visit. His bodyguards rushed him past me rapidly, but I could tell that his medical condition was rather worse than the public has been told.
That same day, the acupuncturist gave my friend his first treatment -- a treatment which fetched him six hours of relief. Six hours may not sound like much, but these were his first good six hours in over a decade.
Here's my issue: Much as I like this woman -- and however much I tell myself that results are inarguable -- whenever she explains the theory behind her practice, not a word she says makes any scientific sense. At least not to me. I can tolerate a certain degree of humbuggery in any field but medicine; I hate quacks.
She sounds like a quack.
And yet she is anything but a quack. My brother had become bedridden; she had him walking within a day. Entire religions have been founded on such turnarounds. And she gave my friend relief from excruciating pain -- a brief period where he could sit to eat his favorite meal and feel human once more.
A long time ago, I heard a guy on the radio say something that has long stuck in my memory: "The secret of the universe is that magic works in spite of the theory of the magaician." Does anyone have a theory of acupuncture that makes logical sense?
22 comments:
When Newton mathematically described the behavior of gravity, he had no idea of why or how the relationships he discovered came to be.
For objects to interact at a distance from each other, without an intermediate or mediating substance actually connecting them, seemed absurd and impossible (Newton explicitly rejected the very notion of 'action at a distance' for those reasons).
It took about 400 years for the more modern understanding of how gravity functions (Einstein said matter warped time-space around it, and objects simply follow the least distance/action principle, travelling along geodesic lines of least resistance as it were).
Actually, until gravity can be put into a grand unified field theory of everything, harmonizing it with quantum chromodynamics in one theoretical construct, it remains unclear if we've figured gravity out even today.
Yet, the mechanism's mystery doesn't mean we don't use our knowledge that it works, and precisely the quantitative way in which it works, to do our daily work, our recreations using ballistic objects falling in earth's gravity, and even our space exploration.
Personally, I find the typical explanation about acupuncture a believable model. Etheric and subtle bodies not on a material plane, but on an electrical or energy basis? Following known meridian lines and grids, with predictable health results? No problem with that whatsoever.
But if you do, put yourself in Newton's shoes, and realize that in this world, even in science, sometimes knowing that a thing works and in a predictable fashion is plenty enough for practical use.
The placebo effect is powerful indeed. Correlation is not causation.
I have had accupuncture for pain from a bad disc in my neck. It works. It not only helped the pain, but also the neuropathy, gave me more range of motion in my neck and reduced the muscle spasms caused by the pain. There have been some scientific studies of accupuncture for things like labor pains, and although the doctors don't understand why, they agreed it works. We don't know exactly how asprin works, although it has been used for pain since prehistory (willow bark) I think crystal healing is most likely placebo effect, but not accupuncture.
LauraK
Long before western medicine came into existence, people used many technigques and substances to relieve discomfort and promote wellness. Western medicine does not address the complete holistic individual either. I've tried accupuncture and found it very effective for my problems, pain one of them. I slept like I had gotten a general anesthetic during each treatment. My condition most assuredly did not regress during this treatment but I have a chronic thing that of course did not go away either. I highly recommend trying it.
Anecdote does not constitute evidence. That people did something long ago does not make it valid. That logic also means that it would be reasonable to kill your enemies and eat their hearts in order to gain their strength.
joe, acupuncture has been extensively studied and found to be effective in relieving pain. a friend of mine is an acupuncturist, and i'll ask him for citations. he is, by the way, a real wizard at what he does, having studied at the new england school of acupuncture. the chief there was trained in his native china in the practice, as well as herbal treatment, which is equally amazing.
my position matches that of anon1201; science manages to organize information in such a way as to make sense, given the data and the standing preconceptions. to a great extent, it's about reconciling reality with our preconceptions. it's always been thus. but science can't know everything.
brunowksi noted that we pursue knowledge that remains just out of our reach. there's something to that. science has never been static; that's part of its nature. which interestingly poses a fascinating inconsistency: most of the 'realities' that science establishes never last that long; the only 'absolutes' are only so in certain contexts, my favorite implication of einstein's work. not even newton nailed it. as einstein pointed out, each guy is just standing on the shoulders of those before him, which means that even einstein knew someone would stand on his. he knew his discoveries would someday show their anomalies, forcing a broader theory, that would then meet the same fate, and so it goes.
the message there is that, as important as science is in terms of exercising empirical thinking, we can never achieve ultimate knowledge, knowledge that stays fixed forever. the empirical process helps us approach each question of experience as it comes along; the fallacy of science is that it ever lapses into thinking it can hammer down a final solution. that's actually the fallacy of human thought in general; absolutism, the ultimate folly.
as for acupuncture, of course it works; has for thousands of years. asians took a different empirical approach, as well as a different approach to medicine; they would only pay their doctors as long as they remained well. seems a much better insurance policy to me; cut out the middle man.
and milo, sure, correlation does not mean causation. but causation can only be understood in terms of an explanation. it appears that the explanation for acupuncture cannot be easily accepted within our western point of view. that's the weakness of our point of view, not of acupuncture; clearly it works.
it's not the placebo effect; the studies control for that. and besides, science can't even explain that! so where is the logic in dismissing acupuncture just because it can't be explained?
trust me; the medical profession exercises many practices it can't explain. many meds work in ways that no one can define, but they're prescribed nonetheless. to do otherwise would be unethical.
acupuncture works. don't look a gift horse in the mouth; just say thanks.
Acupuncture does indeed work for *some* conditions, but there are unscrupulous operators who claim miraculous cures for virtually all diseases.
The practice is also burdened by a quasi-religious history, which can indeed sound like quackery, particularly to a Western mind.
However, acupuncture has measurable affects on the body. In some places, it's used instead of anesthesia during surgery and believe me, that's no placebo affect.
I had mixed results with it myself, for a fairly minor complaint, but there is no doubt it has a powerful physiological affects.
As treatments go, it's cheap and is without side-effects, barring a very small chance of infection. If it gives your friend relief from pain, that's proof enough, even if you don't accept the claims of a traditional Chinese practitioner. Ask Western doctors why or how drugs work, and they won't know either.
It was nice to hear calm rebuttals on a topic of this nature for a change. Your explanation reveals that your world-view accepts the existence of the non-empirical. As a science professional, mine does not. It's impossible to sit on both sides of that fence simultaneously. Thank you for the conversation and I wish you the best.
Logic is a construct of the human mind. It's a little egotistical of humans, don't you think, to expect all of reality to fit into something we made?
To be more specific. We don't really know what the mind is, where it comes from, or how it works. And yet, we are expected to trust absolutely that which comes of a methodology that is a construct of that thing that we do not understand. Now who exactly is it that is running on faith?
Further, the fundamental basis of the scientific method is predicated on the assumption that mind is an emergent property of matter. If, however, as some quantum physics theory seems to suggest, the converse is true, and matter is an emergent phenomenon of mind, the inherent value of the scientific method is itself rendered moot, at least until science catches up to the point where it takes the effects of consciousness on the results of experiments into account.
whether you "believe" in it or "understand" it, accupuncture works.
you don't need to understand things to realize that they -can and do- perform specific functions with specific results.
i mean really.
if you're that skeptical of this particular accupuncturist's abilities, then go to someone else with more certificates on their wall and more years of experience.
or better yet, try it yourself and see what you think.
some practicioners are better than others. find the one that suits you best.
speaking from personal experience, accupuncture is the most helpful, quite often the cheapest, and definitely the easiest medical solution for a wide range of health troubles.
plain and simple, it's good for what ails you. from pain relief to quitting smoking to losing weight to kicking that nagging cold to finally getting some real sleep to helping those torn ligaments and so much more.
One ought not to believe every theory about physical events, Milo. But it is plainly unscientific to dismiss any attempted explanations on the grounds that they are currently non-empirical. Obviously the time-constancy results of the Michelson-Morley experiment should not explained by the actions of Lord Ram. But it is scientifically OK to claim that our understanding of how light works might need to be modified as a consequence. Not everything, as you claim about acupuncture, is either placebo effect or hypnotic suggestion. Some underlying ailments of a more serious nature appear to improve. If that is true, then explanations about subtle energy changes in particular parts of the body also may well be true. We are, after all, human electro-chemical motors with organic batteries.
Denying the scientific legitimacy of phenomena on the basis that purported explanations are currently [my emphasis] non-empirical is to impose a standard that science has never accepted. Sometimes we just have to wait for the theory and techniques to develop in order to explain the phenomena.
Modern medicine and "skeptics" (and I'm a part of both groups) has an unfortunate tendency to look at a topic like acupuncture, look at the theory that it's practitioners espouse, and then dismiss the practice as bunk because the theory is quite obviously bunk. The theory being wrong does not make the end result wrong. There certainly seems to be evidence around that acupuncture does work for pain relief. My theory is two part - one is that it is placebo. This is not dismissive - "placebo" does not mean "does not work". Placebo is in fact one of, if not the, most powerful "medicines" we have. Some studies have for example showed cocaine addicts given placebo exhibiting the same changes in the brain as those given real cocaine - belief it was cocaine was all that was needed. Note that this is not self-reported, these changes are actually observed medically.
The other part of my theory resides with some research done by Robert Holcomb at Vanderbilt University. Holcomb looked at magnetic pain therapy and found that strong magnetic fields in a particular alignment blocked nerve communications, an effect he could even reproduce in vitro. So - your knee might still hurt, but the message never makes it to the brain, so you don't feel it. A spinning needle would create a small magnetic field, so I wonder if the pain relieving effect of acupuncture may be related. Unfortunately, despite the research, mainstream medicine has derided magnetic therapy as well, based on (a) heaps of scam products and (b) the lousy theory proponents used to explain it. Holcomb ended up developing products specifically based on his research, your friend might want to check them out too - http://www.magnabloc.com
I was training to run my 1st LA Marathon and my knee was progressively causing more and more pain. I went the traditional route and the Orthopedic surgeon says, "bad news you will not be able to run the Marathon in a couple of weeks" To say the least I was really upset. A good friend of mine suggested I see his Acupuncture therapist.
I went to see him and a few treatments later my knee felt very good. I took the gamble and ran the marathon and finished under 4 hours which was my original goal.
Funny thing, I run into the Orthopodic surgeon and he gives me sorry about not being able to run the marathon. I tell him I ran the marathon and he gives me this look, that is not possible.
Not only is it possible I ran under my goal time. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
A thin needle inserted at certain nerve intersections and ganglia might well exert a counterforce, an interruption or a disruption of the pain path. The disorder caused by the foreign object coud possibly last for hours or even days. For conditions in which chronic pain is caused by nerve pathways becoming acclimatized to the condition of pain, the disruption could be long-lasting or permanent.
This link suggests the beginning of a scientific explanation for how acupuncture works.
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/17/1668_51359
now isn't this a kicker? all this discussion about science?
interesting, given that just this weekend i found myself longing for the quiet days of the 90s when i spent my time reading, debating, and doing science, even in my spare time!
now that's all completely absorbed by the political nightmare we're trying to survive and correct.
shame we lost milo, but he reminds me of an astrophysicist (big bang specialist) i met years ago at a celebration of einstein's 100th b'day. i asked him what banged, and he laughed and said that was a question for the theologians.
to which i responded that he had just contradicted his assertion during his talk that we must learn more about these phenomena so we don't simply resort to 'superstition.'
i dared not tell him that a case could be made that science is just a highly refined form of superstition. likely because i didn't, we had lunch together and a great discussion.
that is, until i mentioned astrology.
it was actually quite instructive. i'd been studying astrology for years, and found it consistently helpful in providing insights into people and events (still do), as well as elegant and beautifully simple to grasp. yet he knew NOTHING about it, except that he was not SUPPOSED to accept it. so, suddenly, it was as if i had contracted leprosy right there in front of him.
so much for empirical science and objectivity and not allowing biases to interfer with logic, eh?
to his credit, years later i contacted him, as he'd made a career out of dialogues with theologians on the interface between science and religion. he had, over that time, matured in his thinking.
there is such breathtaking arrogance in the notion that science can answer all our questions, or that any answer is absolute. kuhn put a permanent dent in that folly a quarter century ago, but here we are, still giving scientists the god role. a role altogether too many of them accept with all the grace and humility of george w. bush saying thank you to the woman who told him she was so grateful to know god walked with him.
moreover, again as kuhn pointed out, the questions change. we are thus left with an evolving 'reality' that science works to conform to standard preconceptions, as i pointed out earlier.
and so, i ask you, how empiricial is THAT?? because science as it is practiced must always address new phenomena and anomalies to prevailing theories, it can hardly be called objective. prevailing theories, like biblical canon, are often decided by committee, with considerable resort to compelling aesthetics, such as elegance and simplicity, and not to mention politics and infighting.
try as scientists may to exude the personae of spock, we're human. and humans have emotions that drive the targets and indeed the very nature of cognition. to ignore these facts should at the very least disqualify anyone as a 'scientist'!
which should force each and every one of us to recognize that perhaps the only real 'truth' we can ever hope to encounter is our own intent awareness of our own experience. don't mistake this for self-absorption; the more in tune one becomes with one's own experience, the more sensitive we are to everything that goes on in the world, especially the lives of others; those boundaries dissolve. this is what the buddha and most great teachers have taught since forever. it's all some version of 'to thine own self be true.' everything else is just a footnote, even science.
bringing us to another point. the whole of medicine is about relieving suffering, but has become, especially in the western world, about avoiding death and pain and prolonging life and pleasure forever. you don't see many folks out there suggesting that one very real possibility for each of us is to reconsider our relationship with death, and with pain, the two most subjective experiences going.
meditation techinques worth their salt address these two fundamental, subjective experiences of human life. learning to accept death and pain as a part of life, one's relationship with them shifts from enemies to teachers, from evil to helpful, from monsters to bearers of truth. this shift in those relationships gives the practitioner considerable power over those fears, and they diminish significantly.
but of course, science cannot explain meditation or why it works. but, like acupuncture, it just does.
oh, and by the way, the first anon to comment mentioned the fact that gravity remains to be explained. there are theories, but none is fully satisfying, as each one has limits, that relativity thang.
yet, it works!! i do not recommend that anyone out there discard gravity because science cannot explain it.
If Milo really is a scientist, all he needs do is proceed to the NIH website (pubmed) and do a search for "acupuncture".
That will bring up close to 11,000 journal citations. Not all of them are endorsements of accpuncture treatment, but neither are all the articles containing references to "aspirin", "Prozac" or "knee surgery".
What kind of a scientist dismisses a treatment out of hand? What's empirical about that?
Obviously our bodies contain undiscovered secrets, the most seemingly inscrutable of which is our sentience. I wonder if the type of complexity that makes conscious thought possible (no direct comparison, just an example) is shared by other organs and systems.
For example, as a practitioner of some of the more esoteric styles of yoga, I discovered that I could develop a degree of conscious control over my digestive system. Similarly, I can control my heart rate and respiration as well as circulation to extremities. The ability to control seemingly involuntary muscles may originate from more than just neural connections and chemical secretions in the brain. There may also be a synergy between the tissues and chemicals that we can see and analyze as well as the various types of energy produced by living matter that we cannot necessarily analyze at the same time.
Based on those ideas, I would suspect that accupuncture directly stimulates or ebbs that synergy somehow and does it with a sizable margin of error or it'd take alot of repeat visits to get it right for each individual.
-Zolodoco
Acupuncture is based on Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine CM has its own system of diagnosis and treatment, and acupuncture is only one therapy within that medicine. Those who have developed CM since before 2500 B.C.when our first literary work, the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine, was written used both symptoms and signs to diagnose disease before treating it. They developed a unique form of diagnosis called 'pattern differentiation.' Patterns are sets of specific symptoms and signs. For us, finding the signs includes the feeling the pulse and looking at the tongue.For acupuncture specifically, there is also diagnosis according to the channels. It's actually a very complicated system of theories
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Gwenstefni
iowa drug rehab
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