Thus, the fact that nausea’s “power off” button on the wrist belongs to this pre-scientific belief system that has been pummelled by science should give us pause, but I will argue that one can stumble upon truth by trial and error even if one’s beliefs are incorrect. And perhaps because of cultural bias, virtually all acupuncture trials coming out of China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan just happen to show that those tiny needles really work. Performing acupuncture on a rubber arm your brain has been conditioned to think as your own can also yield the same experience as needles in skin, which makes one wonder if acupuncture is all in the mind. Studies have revealed that toothpicks can “work” as well as acupuncture needles for low back pain. Over 2,000 have now been described and it is becoming harder to find an inch of skin on the body that has not been identified as an acupoint. And the number and location of acupuncture points vary widely from one practice to another. The meridians that supposedly connect distant parts of our body and in which Qi flows were modelled not after actual anatomy, but possibly after the idea that the human body must be similar to nature, and nature has rivers. We may as well go looking for the soul with our microscopes. Its central life force, called Qi (pronounced “tchee”), exists outside our large body of scientific knowledge. The edifice of acupuncture continues to crumble as we poke its support beams. I don’t take Chinese medicine.” His public endorsement of acupuncture was political propaganda. He confessed as much to one of his personal physicians, who had been trained in conventional medicine: “Even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine,” Mao said, “I personally do not believe in it. Famously, Mao himself did not believe in these pre-scientific interventions. But peasants outside the big cities needed access to medical care, and Chairman Mao Zedong was intent on nurturing Chinese national pride, and so the 1960s saw him revive traditional Chinese medical practices, including acupuncture, as part of a comprehensive manual to teach the “barefoot doctors” of the countryside some form of healthcare. The teaching of acupuncture was banned by China’s Imperial Medical Academy in 1882 and the use of the technique was itself banned in 1929. It was essentially a form of bloodletting.Īs so-called Western medicine moved away from the notion of humours and embraced scientific inquiry in the 19th century, China followed suit. Acupuncture in those early days bore little resemblance to the modern practice: needles were not hollow and painful areas were lanced. But as the Australian health advocacy group Friends of Science in Medicine summarized in a fantastic article, Traditional Chinese Medicine, of which acupuncture is a branch, is “one of the major pre-scientific medicines.” In the days before the systematic development of the scientific method and well before the advent of clinical trials to help separate the medical wheat from the chaff, diseases were seen as imbalances and blockages in imaginary life forces, and interventions like acupuncture were meant to restore their flow. A brief history of acupunctureĪcupuncture received a makeover in the last fifty years or so, a public relations facelift that obscured its limp foundation and made it look professional and respectable. The first layer is that the nausea spot on the wrist is an acupuncture point. It is easy to find a slew of scientific studies apparently confirming that there is an on/off switch for nausea on the wrist, but digging into this literature requires layers of interpretation. A bit of pressure on the wrist sounds nicer. Sure, drugs exist that claim to relieve nausea, but they don’t always work well and many cause drowsiness. There are even expensive electronic bracelets that will stimulate this spot with the right vibrations. Specialty bracelets, like Sea-Band, can be purchased for this purpose: their stretchable band has a plastic dome stitched on the inside and the dome’s pressure on the wrist is said to do the trick. There is a spot on the wrist that, when pressed, is alleged to stop nausea in its tracks. Some people will argue that my torment could have been prevented by the wise use of my wrists. The weather was so bad, even the whales decided not to show up. I vomited not just once but twice and spent hours on the deck of the boat, getting thoroughly soaked and feeling like I just needed to get off. Thus began one of the worst days of my life. A boat, they concluded, is supposed to move horizontally on a body of water, not vertically. The first couple of big waves were actually fun, but very quickly my brain and my gut decided that they weren’t fun anymore. The weather conditions were dodgy, but our skipper decided to go ahead with the whale watching expedition. A few years ago, I found myself on a small boat in the Pacific Ocean.
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