this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Comradeship // Freechat
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I think everyone here agrees numerology is a scam with zero scientific evidence.
What does lemmygradians think of traditional Chinese medicine?
The scientific reasoning behind specifically acupuncture and cupping sound 100% like bullshit to me, but anecdotally it works for relieving chronic pain for my partner. Go figure.
I’m sure there’s a lot of traditional medicine that works, but the superstitious explanations are annoying. Just tell me the science behind it.
Traditional medicine, Chinese or otherwise, is bullshit. If some tincture happens to have some active ingredient that actual does something, then that ingredient has almost certainly been studied by actual scientists, purified, dosed, and available as a safe (relatively) form at your local pharmacy.
Acupuncture and cupping in particular are no better than placebo at relieving pain. Any temporary relief your partner receives from them is no better than a sugar pill that they are convinced will help them, or no better than the pain relief of a massage. What does everyone do when they bang their knee or elbow on something hard? We rub it. Why? Because rubbing stimulates the surrounding nerves and that extra stimulation helps to drown out and dull the sharp pain…temporarily. Any pain relief from acupuncture and cupping is no different and isn’t permanent. Your partner would be better off going to a licensed physical therapist, with an actual doctorate degree and deep understanding of anatomy. They will not only know techniques to temporarily relieve the pain, but also will be able to provide a custom exercise plan to strengthen the affected area to help prevent repeat injury.
Also a lot of non-scientific “medicine” is extremely dangerous. I know people have had serious injuries from acupuncture, but chiropractors are the worse. Don’t let anyone you care about go to a chiropractor. At best you become a repeat customer and waste a lot of money on a glorified massage from someone pretending to be a doctor, and at worst you end up a paraplegic or dead.
Some of the stuff I've seen on YouTube and tiktok is horrific.
Interestingly enough, their physiotherapist has incorporated acupuncture techniques into the practice.
You see. Patients with chronic pain will try everything. Sometimes at the same time. Scientific, traditional, experimental... They are "happy" to be test subjects, because pain is just too depressing. And after common medicine fails for enough years, maybe the tradeoff of becoming a test subject and discussing the issue with more peers is worth it.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with everything you said, I'm just exposing another perspective on the theme.
I know there’s some quackers, but aren’t there some legit ones who don’t do cracking stuff that don’t claim to be able to fix everything?
There may be some chiropractors that know it is a sham and therefore don’t do some of the more dangerous maneuvers out of fear of hurting someone and getting sued. But I’m not taking those risks and the entire practice is pseudoscience nonsense.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/13/georgia-woman-paralyzed-after-routine-chiropractor-visit/
I'm sure some of it actually works, and some of it might not really work, but have a positive benefit due to the placebo effect or whatever.
Stuff doesn't have to be really true to be helpful - addiction isn't a disease, but "addiction as a disease" is a model that's helped a lot of people.
I don't really have a dog in the fight as long as unproved medicine/treatment isn't used in place of real, proven medicine. If it's just a supplemental thing I don't see any harm in it.
Fair enough, that's a good qualification.
If traditional/alternative medicine worked, it would just be called medicine.
Dumb take. Mainstream medicine is still warped by the conditions of the society in which it is developed and practiced. In America, that means politicized/racist drug policy results in prohibition of actually useful drugs while creating a massive legally prescribed opiod addiction epidemic. That doesn't mean it's all bad, but there's certainly a lot of ways in which "alternative" medicine works better than mainstream medicine.
Ok, and? That doesn't contradict my point. Mainstream medicine in America works a lot of the time, but is fundamentally corrupted by the society it exists in. There are a ton of cases where it doesn't help anyone or actively makes people's health worse, so even completely ineffective alternative treatments are better by comparison in those instances. Then you have alternative treatments like cannabis, MDMA, or psilocybin which are prohibited from mainstream medicine, but almost certainly work better for some patients than what can be offered by mainstream medicine. Granted, it seems likely that they will someday be considered mainstream medicine, but that is not currently the case.
I should add that if your definition of "mainstream medicine" is simply "everything that works", then you just have a useless definition. It does not capture the real treatment a patient may receive when they see a doctor in America.
traditional chinese medicine is complicated. There's a lot of good stuff, and plenty of famous doctors came from ancient China. This does not mean, however, that you should take random herbs.