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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

I am also Chinese and this is exactly how I feel. The experience of going to a doctor with minor ailments, only to be sent away with the attitude of "take some paracetamol and come back when symptoms worsen" is maddening. In the mean time TCM practitioners have answers that often work for these kinds of things.

In people's zeal to point out TCM's problems (due to its pre-modern scientific roots), I feel like they're also throwing away its potential. Skepticism shouldn't be about wholesale dismissal (which is just intellectual laziness masked as rightenousness) but about improving outcomes.

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> In the mean time TCM practitioners have answers that often work for these kinds of things.

You can also take some homeopathic remedies and do a couple of chiropractic adjustments meanwhile. I've also heard that some Christian Science practitioners work wonders if you give them all your Earthly belongings.

The ability to say: "It's likely a viral disease. Wait and see if it worsens" - is a pretty powerful point _in_ _favor_ of modern medicine.

And just who here is rejecting the viral model? Saying "other practitions have stuff worth exploring" is not at all the same as "the regular western medicine model should be abandoned". Why do you feel threathened? This makes no sense to me.

Yet the inverse is not true: the prevailing attitude on HN here is not "western medicine is here to stay as staple but other practitions can add value on top", but to dismiss other practitions wholesale based on their inability to conform to intellectual standards, regardless of measurable outcomes. This is "my god is the only god" all over again.

A chiropractor was able to heal my back problems where months of going to a physiotherapist failed to do so. Aren't we supposed to stay humble and curious for new avenues of scientific exploration, rather than dismissing everything we don't understand?

Yes, chiropractic has gotten an overly negative internet image.

It truly is mostly quackery (varying by the practitioner, and how much kool-aid they've drunk), but there are problems that it can fix.

I had pain going up and down steps for over a year; one THUNK! adjustment by a chiro, and that pain was gone forever (or at least the last 30 years).

That being said: chiros can't fix most of the things its most ardent supporters claim... who are quacks, and very vocal, unfortunately.

Chiropractic was invented in the the US, in the 1800s, by a spiritualist. It's not TCM, it's TAM (Traditional American Medicine) :-P

The unspoken part is the human mind is a big part in health, and treatments that does nothing medically but fools the human mind can work wonders too. There is a lot we do not understand yet, just as blood letting was conventional medicine a few hundred years ago, and it isnt even entirely wrong since we still use leeches and some treatment, I think we have much to gain if we are not hasty in dismissing alternative approaches.

That said, I fully agree homeopathy and chiropractherapy are full of bullshit and potentially dangerous. TCM, as practiced in a certified scholarly environment in Asia, expects the practitioner to have a considerable basic knowledge in modern medicine too, and is humble enough to acknowledge TCM cannot solve everything. A good TCM practitioner will refer you to a GP when they know modern medicine is more effective.

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