"have you tried acupuncture? It fixes everything".
Stifling a laugh, tinged with anger and a long scientific and evidence based diatribe starting in my throat (that I would give to an English speaker without hesitation) about the uselessness of acupuncture, chiropractic, gogi berries, pomegranate juice, tai-chi, shark cartilage, tiger penis, detox, colon cleansing, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, naturopathy, nutritionists claims, anti-oxidants, vitamin pills, reiki, prayer, prayer healing, psychic surgery...this unfortunate list goes on and on...in most cases these actually account for more harm than good, and at best they are - at best - the absolute best that any of these have reached in any analysis, meta-analyses in double blind controlled studies....is the placebo effect. None are better than doing nothing. This is not the place to get into regression to the mean, psychological improvement, etc. I want to get to the funny pictures....but I'm not done with acupuncture yet. It whores itself out with a guise of science, when in reality it is nothing but...nothing. Relaxing, but I can do that at home, for free, with a good book and a glass of wine. Or a nap. Or, reading journal articles and reviews of journal articles that examine (with100% negative results I add) the efficacy of pseudo-scientific claims of supernatural medicine...
So, acupuncture to cure that cut that is a little infected? I'm better off saving time and getting a dog to bite me (canis-puncture...I can sell that to the new-age crowd!). Equally useless, and in fact imparting harm. The British Chiropractic association just, in a battle dealing with Simon Singh, had to make a public request of all their practitioners to take down all claims of efficacy from their website. The leader of a mystic medicine actually asked those who practice it to stop telling people it works, because if the scientists got a hold of it, they would be ruined.
Hmm....
But I digress. I told none of this to my principal, instead I uttered "ill stick with real medicine" and turned my back and ran away from him and his sewing kit (OK, he wasn't actually going to do the acupuncture himself....he could have used toothpicks, at random places in my body, as a real study did to test it out...perhaps he could slap me with his shoes.....his hat...but I digress...all equally as effective as the pins in your skin theory). Its not that a few pins in your face, with nice music in the background and a soft light on will hurt you or give you a chronic illness....but it is the negating of other cures in lieu of this that can, will and has for myriad people caused harm or death.
Anyhow, that got my blood boiling, my skeptic-metre flashing, the scientific nerves peaked... and then I went out to buy oats. I need me some oats.
And found these curious claims. Something totally got lost in translation...totally!
G'day.
click on them to get a better read. Worth the time!
