Out of curiosity: how many of you guys here consider the traditional Chinese medicine valid? (by valid I mean "possibly having positive healing outcomes beyond the placebo effect")
It was that, or get a costly spinal surgery which had a high percentage of failure in my particular case.
I think we shouldn't be so quick to exclude it from "real" medicine. As long as it works on a fair percentage or patients, I say use it and the less drugs the better.
I literally couldn't move my legs for "3" months. Oh, I wish I could have. Having your excrement taken away from your bed by friends isn't my idea of fun. Anytime I tried to move my legs, I would scream out in pain.
My dad works at the local hospital in radiology, so I got VIP CAT and MRI. It was a very bad injury, and one of the best back surgeons in the state of California told me I wasn't going to walk normally again.
What did I do after I got better? I started practicing Qi Gong / Tai Qi / Gung Fu, 6 days a week. Color me sold on the ways of the east.
However, I will say that the analytical side of western medicine is over reliant on tools which render it practically blind to relationships more complicated than linear sensitivity to single variables, whereas the clinic side is driven by the cultural mores and background of doctors who, alarmingly, are not much healthier than the rest of the population.
And then there's the issue of arrogance. My god some doctors are arrogant.
Numerous alternative medicines return the focus to the whole body, whole life, and nutrition, and return the ultimate responsibility for the care of the patient to the patient.
In this, I think that they represent quite a promising volume in healthcare parameter-space.
Multivariate linear regression is currently the swiss army knife of the statistical sciences. Even now there isn't much appreciation of its merits, flaws, applicability and power. But now that we have computers powerful enough to interactively process and visualize data, it seems to me to be possible to bring an understanding of non-linear statistical modeling.
(Does it still count as "traditional" if I prefer to use it in pill form where the dosage is accurately controlled?)
I think the key here is to understand the chemistry and medical impact of the substance, regardless of whether it is "herbal" or "synthetic".
Now I shadow a MDPhd neurologist who got his MD in Taiwan. Apparently the traditional and the Western stuff is integrated in the curriculum. (His specialty and PhD are from the US, I believe UMich for the doctorate)
He does both acupuncture, clinical, and bio research..
Witnessing it, sometimes it really helps and other times it doesn't. Do I know if it's purely placebo? No. His working theory is that acupuncture is related to triggering autonomic response by stimulating nerve clusters, "self-healing", which indicates an upper bound on effectiveness. And sure enough, he'll tell patients that there are some things acupuncture just doesn't work for. (I can't remember; it tends to be purely physical problems like irreversible nerve damage - neuropathy) But he's also told me that he visited some famous spirit healer on vacation in Brazil (just for fun), and about open surgeries with acupuncture and no anesthetics in China.
And this is just acupuncture, which doesn't encompass anything near all of traditional Chinese medicine! He also is knowledgeable in 3 or 4 different systems of acupuncture, which are similar but not isomorphic.
People who don't want to heal simply will not, or at least they'll create a suitable series of different subsequent illnesses. Those who want will heal, possibly through whatever particular enabler they might initially need or simply on their own. There are only few studies of healing miracles, possibly because we really haven't figured out yet why some terminally ill cancer patient with only months left suddenly rids himself of all cancer cells over a mere week.
However, I've now come to the conclusion that it works both ways: the human being can also make himself very sick, up to the level of being dead. This has shifted my focus from healing and curing illnesses -- i.e. fixing the aftermath -- to looking for the answer from the question of why do we get ill in the first place? Why some people almost never get sick? Why some are chronically sick with several illnesses at any given moment? Why these tendencies sometimes change? Why is it that people's lives seem to change in sync with getting chronic illnesses and healing from them?
The validity of the placebo effect kind of fits in logically if we first assume the foremost responsibility of one being healthy or sick to the person himself.