rivendellrose (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rivendellrose) wrote2010-05-25 08:56 am
rivendellrose) wrote2010-05-25 08:56 am
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acupuncture stupidity in Vietnam
Three men released from prison term for rape of an 18 year-old girl because the acupuncturist says they're virgins.
She said examination of a pressure point beneath the convict's ear showed a small capillary was unbroken, which Vietnamese traditional medicine holds to mean that he was a virgin. Hong then examined the other two men.
After the acupuncturist delivered her 'verdict,' the courts reopened the case and found some errors whose significance are not at all explained, and released the guys. No word on what's happened to the rape victim in the mean time, but I'm sure she's thrilled that her three attackers turn out to have been innocent virgins.
Fantastic. Why don't you just duck the girl under water while you're at it? That way you can find out if she's a witch. That would explain everything, wouldn't it?
She said examination of a pressure point beneath the convict's ear showed a small capillary was unbroken, which Vietnamese traditional medicine holds to mean that he was a virgin. Hong then examined the other two men.
After the acupuncturist delivered her 'verdict,' the courts reopened the case and found some errors whose significance are not at all explained, and released the guys. No word on what's happened to the rape victim in the mean time, but I'm sure she's thrilled that her three attackers turn out to have been innocent virgins.
Fantastic. Why don't you just duck the girl under water while you're at it? That way you can find out if she's a witch. That would explain everything, wouldn't it?
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. . actually, no, I have to say that it annoys me when people go all whackjob with practices/disciplines that do have some merit in the real world, but are not precisely mainstream, because it makes it more difficult to persuade people to try legitimate alternative therapies and ruins the reputations of legitimate practitioners. Acupuncture does provide pain relief for some patients when drugs won't anymore; it's not a worthless practice. But I think it's pretty worthless when used to determine someone's sexual . . status? Whatever.
(Incidentally, ditto herbal remedies; a lot of them are very much real medicine, but that doesn't seem to stop people from treating the use of them in a terrifyingly casual manner ("Well my friend's neighbor's hairdresser said this helped her grandmother, or something that sounded like it did? So I went to the health food store and they gave me this other thing that they said was pretty much the same but it was cheaper, but it only had human dosing on the bottle, so I just cut that in half to give to my cat. Do you think that'll help her kidney failure?" . . . and sadly, that is not even an exaggeration. Not a quote, more a representative sampling of various things I've heard (as exact quotes break client confidentiality), but you get the idea.)
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...and I don't even want to think about that person giving people medicine to their cat, because otherwise I'll have to curl up in a ball and cry for that poor kitty.
As for acupuncture... personally, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the efficacy of it floating around. Everything I've read indicates that its major effectiveness is more or less as a placebo - if people believe it works, it works. That's not efficacy, that's a placebo effect. I recognize there's some controversy there, but every study I've heard that supported actual efficacy of acupuncture ended up being too small to be statistically significant. But that's a whole can of worms, right there, so... whatever. I think we can all agree it's no good for telling whether somebody's had sex. :P
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I suppose the best way to sum up my view of "alternative" medicine is that I do, generally, trust traditional western medicine (with a grain of salt and a tendency to question the doctor so that I do understand what's being done and have some assurance that he-or-she knows what he's/she's doing) first and foremost, but I'm reluctant to dismiss a therapy on account of it having not yet been proven effective, where there is anecdotal evidence suggesting it may be, and provided the possible or probable side effects don't wildly outweigh the potential benefits. Innovation occurs because someone tries something they don't know will work - and also, conversely, if people have been doing XYZ for centuries only knowing that it works and not knowing why, that still IS evidence. Not proof, but evidence. IMO where you get in trouble is when people who AREN'T party to generations of folk wisdom read one article on the internet and suddenly decide they're an herbalist, and start screwing with things without benefit of ANY kind of knowledge, either scientific or traditional.
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