RE: Chinese Pseudoscience: The absurd 'understanding' of the human body
I actually laughed out loud at ...What about the psychopathic buddhist?
Apart from that, I know little about it so please don't chew my head and spit it out for this, but whilst I think pseudoscience, Chinese or otherwise, is bunkum I often see a kind of truth in it.
For example :
Because the meridian connected to the heart begins at the armpit and ends at your pinky finger, you should stretch your arms to get those meridian pathways refreshed. Numerous related and specific exercises like breathing evenly and making fists will cure all heart-related ailments. Lifting your arms over your head can't hurt, either.
As someone who did a couple of years student nursing, with all of the academic blurb that went with studies, I know that if you have heart problems: angina, or are starting to suffer from a heart attack, some of the things that can help to alleviate the backlog of blood and thus releive the pressure on the heart is to stretch the arms out wide, thus 'opening' the chest. Breathing slowly can then become more effective, stress levels lower, pain lowers and the symptoms may become less. Certainly it helps the patient. So yes, hocus pocus but I feel it perhaps has roots in something that does work.
A very good post though.
This is unfortunately what allows it to perpetuate. Similar to evolution, we don't hear much about the failings, only the successes, but science is not about trial and error. Who knows how many people in Asia have been killed over thousands of years by trial and error of false logic and poisonous plants, but one in a thousand plants works and that suddenly 'goes viral' and now TCM works because there's the proof.
The same thing here. This is why I put 'specific' in quotes because they're just generic exercises that we may either intuitively know helps, or from personal experience over many generations (I'd imagine even proto-humans knew something along these lines based on a kind of feeling).
But that doesn't validate anything, it just makes things even more dangerous since they have a place to point whenever anybody doubts.
I don't disagree. And not just Asia. Worldwide, shamens, witchdoctors etc brought some good and lots of bad in the name of health. But then so did 'actual' doctors. I think the thing is that 'real' science and medicine moves forward when errors are found by research and correction, whereas pishposh practices dismiss the errors by stating "they must've done it wrong or eaten something I said not to." etc., and then carry along the same bitter road. Sadly 'the errors' often meant lives. Some people are culturally accepting it - education required, some feel that real science has failed them - education required, some think magic is real - eductaion definitely required. Until those issues are addressed the yin yanging of the world will continue.