The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Chinese medicine - did I just spend £50 on magic beans?
Mr Ray
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
So if you live in the UK, you may have noticed these "Chinese pharmacies" or "Chinese doctors" which seem to be popping up all over the place. Recently, I went to such a Chinese doctor on the advice of a friend, to see if they could do anything about my tinitus. Said friend had had some success with them in the past, and claimed the stuff they gave him for his insomnia was much better than anything any medical professional had given him. I decided it was worth a go, since blocked sinuses had increased the volume of my tinitus considerably, and I was willing to try anything if it would even help a little bit.
The thing is, I wasn't entirely convinced by the place if i'm honest.
I was given the sales pitch from the lady inside, how Chinese medicine is "different" from western medicine, how it has 1000 years of history so therefore its the greatest thing ever and i've made the right choice e.t.c. I was with her until she uttered the word "Chi". At that point my bullshit alarm started ringing. Her diagnosis consisted of measuring me, examining my tounge, and asking if I'd been tired recently. I responded in the affirmative. I was then sold four bottles of pills and a tonic, to be taken twice daily. Not for the tinitus you understand, for my "Chi", i'm getting acupuncture this week for that.
I'm sure whatever's in these pills (I can't remember the specifics other than the main ingredient of the tonic is ginseng) can't be doing me any harm, but I have to question whether its done me £50 worth of good so far, especially if i'm meant to keep taking them forever. Basically, i'm wondering where the line is between medicine, Chinese medicine and homeopathy. Is there such a line? Have I spent £50 on magic beans? I certainly feel a lot better than before I started taking the pills and tonic, but coming out of a sinus infection will do that. Have I been had? Should I cancel the acupuncture? I'm not the world's biggest fan of needles but if it has any effect at all on my tinitus i'll consider it money well spent.
The thing is, I wasn't entirely convinced by the place if i'm honest.
I was given the sales pitch from the lady inside, how Chinese medicine is "different" from western medicine, how it has 1000 years of history so therefore its the greatest thing ever and i've made the right choice e.t.c. I was with her until she uttered the word "Chi". At that point my bullshit alarm started ringing. Her diagnosis consisted of measuring me, examining my tounge, and asking if I'd been tired recently. I responded in the affirmative. I was then sold four bottles of pills and a tonic, to be taken twice daily. Not for the tinitus you understand, for my "Chi", i'm getting acupuncture this week for that.
I'm sure whatever's in these pills (I can't remember the specifics other than the main ingredient of the tonic is ginseng) can't be doing me any harm, but I have to question whether its done me £50 worth of good so far, especially if i'm meant to keep taking them forever. Basically, i'm wondering where the line is between medicine, Chinese medicine and homeopathy. Is there such a line? Have I spent £50 on magic beans? I certainly feel a lot better than before I started taking the pills and tonic, but coming out of a sinus infection will do that. Have I been had? Should I cancel the acupuncture? I'm not the world's biggest fan of needles but if it has any effect at all on my tinitus i'll consider it money well spent.
Mr Ray on
0
Posts
Now, as to whether you specifically got magic beans, I can't be sure. Our herbalist was discovered through trial and error. Just trying to figure out who knew their shit and who didn't and then choosing the best one. I'm not sure about acupuncture though. I assume it was once a successful profession but it's so rare now that I'm not sure about the quality of the practitioners.
I wouldn't bother wasting your money on the acupuncture and look at the pills with a great amount of skepticism.
If it makes you feel better, a lot of western medicine is bullshit too.
Anyway. In an effort to avoid offending Western sensibilities, practitioners have substituted quite a few ingredients. So, you're basically just getting a General Tso's knockoff of traditional Chinese medicine.
Perhaps you should do a smidgen of reading there, since you seem to be pretty skeptical about the supposed healing powers of this [strike]water[/strike] medicine already.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Well its clearly not all placebo bullshit given my friend's insomnia medicine works.
This right here. This is what's true. There is a reason that in China for anything actually important they go see a western hospital. Literally. It's a saying there and everything.
Some of the stuff in Chinese medicine can be good for you, but it's not going to be what cures you.
Not to be a dick, but do you know what the placebo effect is? o_O
That's exactly why your friend's insomnia meds work - because he believes they do.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
But also remember -- you weren't sold these things. You bought them. The nice Chinese lady didn't somehow remove your wallet, take out £50, and then return it to you.
Ahahaha I was thinking this.
But I'm going to reiterate and qualify it with the fact that I spent a month studying Chinese medicine in Chinese from Chinese teachers that thought it was legitimate: The vast, vast majority is bullshit, and unregulated bullshit at that.
This isn't right. Chinese medicine (in a broad sense) is about accomplishing the same thing as your drug store pills through naturally occurring plants and animal matter. An example would be ancient humans in the dark ages making tea out of willow bark (or other salicylate-rich plants) in order to accomplish the same results as an aspirin tablet does today.
Does it work? Sure. As well as that box of Bayer on the table? Now that depends. In the most authentic of "Chienese medicine" clinics (you know, the ones actually in China and SE Asia), skilled professionals train for a long time to figure out which balance of various plants will accomplish the exact results needed for a proper diagnosis, and then apply them to the case at hand. That means your medicine might just work as well or better than western medications because they are targeting the exact symptoms you have, rather than going for blanket drugs to wipe out what you have been diagnosed with plus a host of other things. Of course, this would require someone who has been extensively trained at this sort of diagnosis, and if these places are appearing everywhere, it's not likely that your practitioner was trained at all.
On the other side, the medicinal properties of willow bark are significantly less potent than Bayer aspirin. This is usually true across all of the field. While eastern and western medicine are comparable in many ways, western diagnosis techniques are significantly more advanced and western medicine is more likely to produce positive results. This isn't universally true, a good doctor is always better than a bad doctor, no matter what the tradition.
So, to sum up:
-These medicines do work providing you have been diagnosed properly and take enough of them.
-They probably don't work as well as modern western medicine.
-They have a feel-good whole-foodsy attitude that can create a positive mind effect, especially if you naturally distrust western medicine.
-No, the medicines aren't all bogus, there is science behind them, just not... you know.. up to date science.
-If you paid a lot of cash while these sort of places are "springing up" everywhere, you probably got scammed.
As an aside, do they have Mucinex in the UK? It's a high-dose, slow-release guaiphenesin (decongestant) capsule that clears everything out (and keeps it clear.) It's pretty spectacular stuff (although it dehydrates... drink lots of water.)
I say this as a real Chinese person.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
tl;dr If there's any medicine in it, it's probably the same stuff you'd get from your doctor, just in a less controlled dosage.
Edit: Enc said it better than me. Read his post.
Chinese 'medicine' is a lot like western natural remedies - the stuff that works is studied and used to make real medicine. Everything else is the placebo effect and wishful thinking.
It's surprising how many people distrust doctors but trust some quack. Probably because the doctor says "it might work, but you should also eat better and exercise and that takes work, you know." And the herbalist says "Oh just take a pill it'll fix everything."
My line whenever someone talks about it is "An alternative to medicine is not alternative medicine."
The NIH disagrees with you.
Best-case scenario: you're taking something you don't need. Worst-case scenario: you've got a genetic defect (which is somewhat common among white people) that causes iron overload, and isn't usually caught until an organ fails. Unless you have an iron deficiency or lose blood routinely, you don't need to take an iron supplement.
edit: the point is, sometimes these supplements aren't good for you (or aren't even FOR you.) So do your own research before you take anything (herbal or otherwise.)
The differentiation between doctor and quack is the key here, though. There are plenty of "doctors" in the US that bought their degrees and are practicing without being nearly qualified enough to be doing their jobs. Opposing this, in rural China there are "quacks" that know their stuff, have centuries of knowledge of what works and what doesn't backing their hands, and do great works with minimal materials.
The long and short of it is: a good doctor of either will tell you to eat right, exercise, and do generally good for you things, no matter what school of medicine he follows. Be it shaman or family practitioner, a good doctor will help you, a con man will con you. The medicine itself shouldn't be the deciding factor of who is and isn't a quack.
Although, unless you are super poor, if you live in the west you should probably follow western medicine. If you live in the far east, you are probably better off following eastern medicine. It's all about what you know. In the west we know what a doctor should be telling us and how he should act. We don't know how eastern medicine practices work. The knowledge is a good way to differentiate "quacks" from actual professional healers. I'm sure somewhere in Cambodia there are "Doctors" selling sugar pills as "Advanced Medicine!" for whatever the folk of the area need at the moment, and because they don't know enough about western medicine, some fall under the scam there too.
A good idea would be to ask for specifics of how each supplement is supposed to help you, how exactly it does that, and what the dangers are (just like you would with a normal doctor). If they can't tell you without falling back on mystical uncertainties (It... uh... frees up your chi or something?), they are scamming you.
No. Do you think a top Chinese official who gets actually sick is going to stick with 'eastern medicine' (you're going to have to specify exactly what this means) or western medicine? This is a rhetorical question, he’s going to go with the western model because it’s objectively and measurably superior. We took all these herbal remedies, ran them through the empirical mode and the stuff that worked became medicine.
Hand me down knowledge is no match for actual medical knowledge gained from going to medical school.
I'm not saying the folk medicine is going to be superior, but if you are a peasant in southeast Asia you are more likely going to be able to spot a snake oil salesman vending out shady versions of the local roots and berries medicinal tradition than you would be western medicine. Same thing here, if a doctor starts offing you expensive pills for a relatively simple head cold, you might be a bit on guard. But how many people know how much willow bark to brew in green tea for a headache? As a culture, we know how to spot bad doctors of the western scientific tradition. Same with folk in their own folk medicine traditions.
I'll say it again, since it's been passed over in my earlier posts: Western science is more accurate in diagnosis and more potent in execution. This dosen't mean that folk medicines are all phony, as other in the thread have suggested. They work, they work scientifically, just not as well or as uniformly without proper diagnosis.
Folk medicines like what are predominant in southeast Asia are great for the people who need them. They are cheap, as most of the ingredients are easy to find, they work and are culturally identifiable. You can also verify what something is easier than someplace in the backwoods where there is no governing authority ensuring that your aspirin isn't poison or flour.
Should you use them if you live in the states? I wouldn't.
Its a bunch of fat and skin tissue.
Durp.
But seriously, when buying medicine, just ask yourself 'Is this regulated by a body that I trust with my money and health?'
There is just medicine.
Western medicine works on the scientific method, where we (generally) split people up into two groups and give both groups different treatment to see how they compare. Typically, one group is given a placebo and the other group gets whatever we're trying to test, and they aren't told which one they get.
If putting garlic up your butt or WHATEVER was effective at treating symptoms, studies held in the above format would reveal that, and we would call it medicine. If it wasn't effective, we generally call it "alternative medicine" or "an alternative to medicine."
Whether you want to use things like that is up to you. My vote is that it's probably a waste of money, and if it could be proven effective, we would start using it everywhere.
The spelling is different
This is called regression towards the mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_towards_the_mean
Yes
Yes
It won't and will not be.
Yeah plus if you whitefolks you may have been had, not knowing anything else about the particular place frequented.
But more like 10% Effective Remedies and 90% Ginseng that people believe is a cure-all. Or Gotu-Kola or whateve's biggest in fad now. That shit's a weed that grows in my back yard and I've never especially needed it for anything.
Also, Tinnitus? The ear ringing? I've heard of some mediciney chews on the radios but google results say chewing dried fruit helps. You may have tried google though.
Edit: Ah dude if you're supposed to keep taking them forever, they just RAPED YOUR WALLET YOUVE TOTALLY BEEN HAD.
The only thing I will say is that I believe there is some (real, tested) evidence that acupuncture does work in some instances, though I have absolutely zero idea whether it would have any effect on tinitus (though by default I'd wager not)
Your beans, however, were quite non-magical; one of the first things you'll be shocked by if you actually look at well-controlled drug trials is how enormous the placebo effect actually is
Every time that I have gone to a Chinese doctor they have been retarded.
A neurologist recommended I have an MRI done for an inflamed cranial nerve known as Bells' Palsy. An MRI does not have enough resolution to see the inflammation of a tiny cranial nerve, i told her so. Then the retard didn't know what medicine to give me. Since it was an inflamed nerve I recommended to the neurologist anti-inflammatories. She looked it up in a book and then agreed with me.
Also when I had Bell's Palsy all of our Chinese friends had heard of someone having had it and how acupuncture did wonders to cure it, so they were all pressuring me saying how i had to have it done.
So I went every day for maybe 2 weeks to get needles in my face for a condition that GOES AWAY ON ITS OWN.
Why don't they think that drinking water cures it? I drank water every day i was ill. How about breathing air? Just because we do something alongside the healing process does not mean that something is the cure.
I knew it would go away on its own but I kept going because I didn't want the 50 odd people who were worried about me to keep worrying.
Also the initial visit to a famous and well respected doctor resulted in him using suction cups on my back and stabbing me two dozen times in the face with a sharp piece of metal. The last stab was inside my nostril, making my eyes tear up and making my girlfriend who was on the phone with her mom tell her I was crying!
Alongside the stabbings, hot-air suction balls, and bullshit recommendations, they also gave me medicine to drink which before cooking was basically collected from the forest floor. Old leaves, twigs, and rotten fungus had to be boiled in a solid iron kettle. The resulting brew looked like runny diarrhea and tasted fouler than concentrated dog shit.
I have had numerous encounters with Chinese docs practicing their own stupid brand of medicine as well as screwing up western medicine here. They are terrible and always piss me off.
I blame Mao Ze Dong for assfucking this country and destroying the original education systems, giving birth to a new and wholly retarded school system that creates idiots instead of professionals.
My brother also had tinitus and the Chinese docs gave him a completely useless 3,000rmb (Chinese money) MRI which found nothing.
As pointed out above, placebos work also. The question of evidence-based medicine is whether the prescribed treatment works any better than a placebo.
Evidence-based medicine uses the scientific method, double-blind experiments, and statistical significance to do the best job we possibly can to determine whether a particular therapy (chemical or not) is safe and more effective than a placebo, which should be indistinguishable to the patient. We recognize that the placebo effect has some power to make people feel better in some circumstances; the question is - can we do better than that?
In addition, for many treatments we not only understand their effects, but we also understand the mechanisms of their working.
I have no doubt that there are some things you can buy and ingest that we have not gotten around to testing for their safety and effectiveness in a controlled, double-blind way. However, why would you rely on these unproven, unknown treatments, when we have alternatives that we DO understand very well, in fact, and (to the best of our knowledge) are both safe and effective?
How do you know? The answer is, the best way you can know if it works any better than a sugar pill is to run double-blind controlled studies. Preferably lots of them, preferably with very good controls. Science will admit that it does not determine truth, but increasingly good approximations of the truth. Other epistemologies may claim that they can do better, but offer precious little to justify it.
Long training does not imply wisdom. What information is that training based on? Scientologists train for years to learn how to rid their bodies of millions of invisible ghosts of murdered aliens, does that make those ghosts real, or the techniques to rid yourself of them useful?
If folk anecdotes about the efficacy of certain treatments that are "thousands of years old" (Chinese medicine practitioners can never quite agree on how many thousands) are true, then when subjected to the scrutiny of evidence-based medicine (again, controlled, double-blind, statistically significant studies) their efficacy will be borne out. If not, then either the treatment was bogus or the study had an issue; you then can run and refine more studies to determine which is the case.
First, let's distinguish between "Western" medicine and evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine uses the scientific method to determine the safety and effectiveness of treatments, regardless of what hemisphere they come from. Western medicine generally follows the scientific method, but over the years some "folk" treatments have persisted. For many of these, people believe them to be evidence-based, when in fact the evidence was inconclusive or not present. In these cases, the evidence-based medicine movement is working to run experiments that improve the quality of evidence in these areas and determine whether the treatments are effective or not (if not, they are discarded).
What makes you think that "western" medications do not target the symptoms that a person has? What do you mean by "blanket drugs to wipe out what you have been diagnosed with plus a host of other things." When my "Western" doctor is treating asthma and prescribes Albuterol, he's prescribing it because it relaxes muscles in the lungs and "opens them up." If it does something else also, then that's a side effect, and we try pretty hard to understand and minimize those. He's not giving me some kind of "super cure-all" and trying the shotgun method to treat me.
How do you know that willow bark is less potent? If it's because of double-blind controlled studies, then why not just take the aspirin or the correct dose of the willow bark? If it's because aspirin is well-understood and willow bark is not, then why fiddle around with a "treatment" for which you don't have safety and effectiveness data?
The reason evidence-based medicine is more likely to produce positive results is because we run experiments that demonstrate that it produces positive results. It's not a matter of who studied harder in school, it's solely a matter of what treatments are effective and what treatments are not.
You claim that a good doctor is always better than a bad doctor in any tradition, but that's a really specious statement. What do you mean by "good?" Do you mean "good" as perceived from that tradition's perspective? A "good" Christian science doctor will tell you to go meditate and read some obscure Mary Baker Eddy apocrypha for really serious ailments, but I can guarantee that doing so won't fix your torn ACL. Do you mean "good" as in "their treatments are effective?" If so, then your statement is merely a tautology: doctors that prescribe effective treatments are effective, while doctors that prescribe ineffective treatments are ineffective.
How do you know?
Again, how do you know?
The placebo effect is indeed powerful. In fact, even those of us that subscribe to evidence-based medicine exclusively can do things to trigger it. I take zinc when I get a cold, because there are a whole bunch of studies that are really inconclusive about whether it works, and there are a couple reasonable hypotheses about mechanisms by which zinc could block viral activity. So, since I believe it might help me, it does. I also have very good safety data that says the worst I'm doing is not very much. Vitamin C doesn't work for me, because there are lots of studies that show pretty conclusively that Vitamin C doesn't do shit for a cold.
This statement is specious as well. There are lots of things you can do that are very slightly scientific or quasi-scientific. For example, you could run single-blind studies, or non-blind studies, and you might still get some interesting data. The data may even be right. Over "thousands of years" practitioners may or may not have run informal experiments on treatments. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to do anything systematic, nor did they systematically record their findings. So we have very weak evidence that these treatments are effective on one hand. On the other hand, we have systematically-recorded mountains of evidence on a bunch of other treatments. Why, then, would you even consider treatments from the former category?
This is bogus reasoning. Some treatments are expensive. New communities will have a bunch of doctors with evidence-based knowledge moving in, and so they too will be "springing up." Neither implies that you got scammed.
Here is how you know you got scammed: if the treatment you were given was prescribed to you based on something less than evidence from a double-blind, controlled study, THEN you got scammed.