The idea is to establish a high degree of confidence in the application of acupuncture. With placebos often offering 10 to 20% rates of effectiveness, a drug or treatment has to exceed that markedly to be taken seriously, and should show benefits greater than 50% to be considered particularly effective.
When something has been in continual use for whatever it is, estimates range from around 3, 4, 5, 6, 7000 yrs or something, it is actually a profound achievement in the bigger scheme of things. For example how many things like this can you think of except for wood, water, earth, metal fire etc. In such instances any potential problems or limitations are more likely to lie with the current paradigm than with these “new” techniques, but that’s jmo. I have no problems with the contemporary testing, it is the smart, safe and prudent thing to do. It is also one of the effects of Political control but that’s another story.
What is going to become known as the complementary health care paradigm (natural & hi tech together) is going to be very very different to what folks recognize as being medicine today. The potential of hi tech in medicine seems almost boundless and more power to these people they are doing wonderful work, I hope that none of us here ever need to partake in the fruits of their labors. I wonder how long it is going to take them to find the elixir of immortality like the Buddha did, thousands of years ago, sorry, couldn’t resist, But on a much more lower order mundane level, in the regular course of things I hope no one ever gets sick either, but with things like say migraine headaches or something a visit to an acupuncturist is going to be wholly different experience compared to a visit to a regular MD, because this time the patient is going to be treated and not the disease.
This is a bit of a mindf**k for a lot of doctors, strange as this may seem, this is a conceptual leap because they are used to identifying the symptoms and treating them, so that when they get two patients with similar migraine headaches they are going to prescribe exactly the same medication and the same dosage, no matter that one of them is a 20 year guy in the prime of his health or a lady of 68, who is doing fine but she just has these terrible headaches, ceteris parribus so to speak. What they do is “easy”, “formulaic” (no disrespect intended to any doctors out there) and they don’t want no one stepping on their well guarded turf. But nevertheless it is the migraine headache that is going to be treated, which seems to be the common sense thing to do, so they will each be given a whole stash of pills. Now what of the body of the twenty year old or the 68 year old lady, they’re hardly the same. What are the chances that the conditions in their bodies are going to be identical. I’d say close to zero. Nevermind that the pills will get rid of the headaches in each particular case.
Please bear in mind that this is entirely metaphorical in nature, that I am not a doctor and most certainly that this is not medical advice. In fact this is just a dream that I happen to rember quite well. But the story of the acupuncturist if he knows what he is doing, is that he is going to want to investigate what it is exactly in each of them, that is actually causing these headaches. The problem that the western paradigm is going to have in finding what to measure has to do with the aggregates and the fact that some of them are non physical. Big dilemma. Because the reason for the headaches is actually going to be found in some sort imbalance in the energies of the body that flow along certain lines, called meridians and so far to my knowledge “we” have limited “scientific” access to these spheres. The problem is that while they might both have headaches, it’s pretty much near damn certain that the particularity of their individual imbalances will arise from different sets of conditions.
Western medicine has yet to learn how to treat the patient instead of the dis-ease or rather the symptoms have been split off and treated in isolation often on very coarse, much coarser than necessary, levels. For eg both patients take their stash of pills home with them and take them. Gulp. done. The particularities of their headaches are not going to be identical, as it is so with the rest of their bodies, so what happens when they take the pills. Well the old dear might be running a bit slow so she can only uptake so much of the mooti, which was the same dose given to the 20 year old guy, what happens to the rest of the stuff she’s not using. Well if you think that she is a mechanical contraption, not much. There might be whats known as some side effects, but in the end she’ll just pass out unused, but not reclaimable mooti. Now she paid good money for her mooti, or someone did, and if they knew about this they might just get pissed at the amount of waste product which can be at least 50% and much higher, for she was given much much more than she needed and the mkt economy is about nothing if it is not about efficiencies. The amount her body absorbed was all that she needed and this info could be easily calculated in advance more accurately if desired by the powers that be that is. Who gets to pay the piper. She does because she might at this point start having some nasty side effects from all this extra shit sloshing around in her body, so she will be given another pill and so on and so on.
Now the young guy on the other hand, he may waste say only around 20% of it but he’s young and built like a bull and he can take it, doesn’t feel anything except that his headache is gone, unless for some reason he too is bothered by the side effects of this medicine for example and he too will be given another pill. Now look the stuff does it job, sort of, it relieves the symptoms and the pain and people get their lives back from these kinds of things, so I am not disparaging the pills, I am talking about the process. And then what happens is 3 months later they’re both back because of these headaches that neither of them can take for much longer. And so it goes.
On the other hand they’re both now at the natural medicine voodoo mans place. The furnishings look a bit Asian and they’re a bit nervous because they’ve never done anything like this before but they came because of the pain and by now they are desperate to get rid of it. So the clock strikes nine and they step in for an initial consultation for say 90 minutes, and finally after all these years the patient, not the disease is going to start getting some treatment. Are you beginning to see the light.
Now back to those aggregates they called all sorts of beautiful names, hence the ideation of them as Art. So you might have a decent conversation to begin with, as you tell the doctor who should hold few preconceptions, not about your disease but about your self. He will want to know about you, where you live, whats in your house, whats around you, what you do with your life, how hard you work, what kind of work is it, what do you have to do, how long does it take, how do feel at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, what do you like to eat smoke and drink, what is your problem and what kind of exercise do you do etc etc. Now mind you, you might not realize that you have, I forget, I dunno 20-30 pulses throughout your body, but these do not correlate to what you know of as your pulse. This is one diagnostic method. Someone else might look at your tongue and see all they need to see. This is another diagnostic method. Someone else might look at your ear and see everything and this is possible because since we are of the cosmos and the cosmos is of us well we reflect everything perfectly. Take your nose for example, but where does it start. Now if your doctor is a plastic surgeon he’ll know exactly where this is, or at the least he’ll identify what to him is a starting point. But what will you do should this cheeky acupuncturist ask you where your nose starts, you’ll point to a spot, and then he might say how do you know, and you’ll say that you don’t, just because, and then he’ll point to another spot and say how about it starts here and you’ll say ok and then he does this again and you’ll say ok fine but lets roll as you get tired of his silly game, which is a condition he might notice. But the reason that the game might be successful is that you might stop thinking of yourself as bits and pieces of individual parts all put together quite nicely mind you except that you’ve got this helluva headache, and you’ve come to get some of that juice that super duper voodoo nectar, that as all those silly scientists will tell you, well some will say that exists but it has no inherent essence, or inherent existence, while those others will just simply say well it doesn’t exist because we can’t find it, so there. Who knows you might even start to think of yourself as a living system instead of just sort of knowing somehow that this is true.
It take some study and practice to learn what to see or what to feel, depending on the diagnostic method, but there are a few short cuts here and there too. In the arts there are lots of different schools and lots of different styles, and names and they can be completely different experiences. For example the way that this is organized on a govt level in china well I don’t really know about that or what the different places are in Chicago that do this, but you can use your imagination, I’d imagine it’s a totally different experience. Industry Standardization is another massive political playing field in the US as you can too imagine. So that’s the bureaucratic end of it so to speak. What I speak of is the experience with which I am familiar, which is my sisters husbands place in Manhattan.
Now back to young lad who is pumped and to the elderly lady who is slumped, The doc wants to know what is going on so you’ve told him. He makes you take your clothes off in front of him fills the room with incense and begins chanting at the top of his lungs, with an occasional yeah baby thrown in every now and then for good measure. You run butt naked out of there screaming your ass off, screaming blue bloody murder as you hightail it down Fifth and he calmly invites in his next victim, I mean patient. You go home, but the problem is that your damn headaches come back and for some reason you’re not sure exactly what it is, you think that this guy can help. So you give it another shot, after all nothing else has helped so far, and he did send your clothes back to you, except this time you and the young lad too, decide that you both need some extra muscle so you decide to go in together. You can only imagine the ruckus. But by now you’re cool, you’re ok, you’ve gotten used to this and so far you haven’t really been hurt. You got some headphones on, you’re lying comfortably on the table, you notice his certificates on the wall, the room feels cozy, and then you see those facking needles and you freak, but you try to hold on, telling yourself that this it’s not going to be so bad.
The young man on the other hand with the same migraine headache as yours is having needles stuck in, but some of them are in different places They’re not like a syringe needle at all, they are exteremeley thin and very flexible, you can really twang them like a tuning fork, why is that but anyway they are different lengths and in some spots they do hurt a bit but generally it’s fine. The whole thing of how the needles feel going in to the patient and they feel to the doctor, and which needle at which point, is the subject of lots of literature so I’m not going to get hung up on this, you can just experience it, it is absolutely fine and there is nothing to be scared of. If you were to go in somewhere so that they could jab you with a needle, this shit would not still be around after 5000 yrs. The reasons you and him have the needles applied as you each do, is because you have different sets of conditions or imbalances compared to each other. Now if you don’t like the needles, and I’m pretty certain that right now there isn’t a single one in his whole office because he’s discarded them and is now using some relatively simple hi tech voodoo gizmo to administer an electrical pulse to the points, which he can just dial up and down as he determines. It’s a lot less messy with all those used needles and swabs, and patients prefer it too.
So the deal is your body has energy maps and in the course of everyday living energy gets blocked up in certain places, if it doesn’t get freed up something will come up, for things are dependent arising, there is no such thing as independent origination. The desired state is neutral and without blockage, truly without blockage, in the very much bigger picture the energy freed up and power that can become available, can come to be in the condition known as profound. The thing that comes up in this case would be these headaches that now find the forces applied, difficult to resist, as the blockages dissolve under the manipulation of the energy field which in the buddhas case, he just used the intellect. You agree to a few more treatments and you simply cannot believe this because this is the first time in 10 years that you’ve been headache free for 6 months. You are inspired take care of lifestyle changes that you’ve been meaning to implement for ages, you feel healthy in charge and free and so on. I hope you all realize that this is a fairy tale and just a figment of my imagination. But you are psyched. And go in for a tune up every now and then, or if something specific happens like a bad cough say etc you go in again, take some of the natural mooti, or synthetic ones even, he will advise, and hopefully you get better. If not you start moving up up the chain and if allopathic medicine is required, well after consulting with your doctor you decide whether you should take it or not. If you do and it still doesn’t work then etc etc. The stuff can be also be used extensively in cases of immunodeficiency but here it would normally be where the complementary paradigm becomes clearly evident because for sure in NY your patient is likely to be on anti retrovirals, but still needs overall help due to the myriad of factors and conditions involved. And so it goes.
The thing is it seems that you are looking at this in such a way as if it were some sort of surrogate for the medicine you already know. Well it is, but it isn’t in the sense that this is systems approach, while your other medicine was more of a mechanical one. Preventative medicine is no joke, because when these dudes get skills watch out. They can pick up imbalance at very early stages, unless you come to them to late which you probably will initially because by the time something manifests on the material level then the imbalance by definition has already gone quite far, but once you’ve been through this totally bizarre experience once it’s quite likely that you’ll have a much better idea of what it is that you need to do to look after yourself, and in this way you endeavour to keep the juice going in all the ways that you’ve learnt about and there are lots of them, like different relaxation techniques and eating proper food or like playing a good game of soccer, or going disco dancing or knitting or whatever it is that it pleases you to do, in this way you will feel happy, which is the ultimate goal of conventional existence. This kind of medicine is very much about learning to live a happier fuller life and the relationship with your practitioner, or in the best of cases should I say, it should be, because if you are both on the same wavelength maximum healing will occur, if you’re operating on different channels to each other, the relationship probably won’t last.
In the light of all these abovementioned factors, trying to subject this system to the same set of rules as before is inherently problematic, but at least it does look like they are figuring out a way of how to satisfy themselves. Please note again that this is my fantasy and I just right now made it all up, in no way is this to be construed in any way shape or form as any sort of Medical Advice. Do you catch my drift. Gotta run, dinner calls. |
