Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, maybe. As in: sure, a lot of breathing techniques and sometimes even useful natural remedies are some of the oldest recorded ones if they are coming from "the east", but in the end that corpus of wisdom is mostly a spaghetti mess of helpful and harmful techniques that is really hard to disentangle from cultism, oogie-boogie and autocratic belief systems.

There's no shortage of stupidity in eastern "wisdom":

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wre... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790910/

I for one prefer the clean extraction (or parallel invention/construction, whatever your take on that is) of single techniques based on double-blind evidence instead of being told that I can't just do breathing exercises properly without also listening to the incoherent ramblings of a random guru:

https://www.wimhofmethod.com/science

Yep, the Wim Hof method was original research too, but that guy basically just said: I tried some things, these seem to work, here's the proof, take it or leave it. Goes on to break some records and just STFU's otherwise.

You cite an NYT article "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body". That is like citing an article "How You Can Hurt Yourself With A Kitchen Knife" to argue how the culinary arts are dangerous gobbledygook.

Yes, these practices can hurt you if you don't do them properly.

And there is nothing wrong with performing or following original research, as long as you credit the work upon which you build.

It's not difficult to find traditional eastern wisdom that have no known health benefits and can have adverse effects. Just look at Gua Sha for example. Not everything is good in TCM, a lot of it is not well tested following theories that are demonstrably false.

Does it mean that there's nothing of interest? No. There are some remedies based on Traditional Chinese Medecine that have proven to be beneficial. After all, this is how Artemisinin which is used as a cure for Malaria was discovered from a traditional herbal remedy from the 4th century. But, this is after trying multiple traditional remedies. Don't underestimate the value of curation when finding a working remedy from the multitude of non-working traditional cures.

Did an acupuncturist stick a needle too deep?

Downvoters.. reflect on all the quackery in Western medicine for a moment. Writing so many paragraphs about all of the "stupidity in eastern wisdom" without recognizing you can make all of the same statements about Western traditions. Even in modern institutions.

So unnecessary just to say you like verifiable/repeatable studies.

Just realized, even funnier is that the studies cited on the Wim Hof site are not blinded studies at all, let alone double blind, despite the claims in that tirade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com