acupuncture stupidity in Vietnam

[rivendellrose]

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?

Comments

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Oh, herbal remedies. Big yes to people needing to be aware that, hello, they're drugs. And, incidentally, they often have contaminants (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/health/policy/26herbal.html), thanks to the fact that they have no governmental oversight or FDA control! But even disregarding the contaminant issue, people need to be aware that just because something is herbal or "natural" (a word I am seriously coming to dread when it comes to just about everything because of how horribly it gets misused) it can still hurt you. There's this bizarre idea that if things are herbal, of course they can't actually do damage, which is just absurd. Hello, a lot of plants are poisonous? And any medication, made of anything, if it actually does something, can hurt you if you take the wrong kind or too much.

...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

[websandwhiskers.livejournal.com]

Well, my evidence re: acupuncture is anecdotal, but it involves animals. I'm not sure to what degree a placebo effect occurs in animals, because I'm not sure to what degree they have expectations in regard to their treatment. I think they do sometimes - a small percentage of the time - understand that something is being done to help them. I think the majority of the time they tolerate treatment because they trust their owners, not because they understand its benefits. And some of them just plain don't tolerate treatment, and have to be physically restrained. We have owners report that their pet feels better after acupuncture, but this does rely on owner (i.e., human) perception . . maybe they see improvement because they expect to see improvement? I think to say definitively one way or another you'd have to use measurable variables, i.e. increased food consumption, duration of activity, etc, to judge actual pain relief. To my knowledge no such study has been done . . but I'm tentatively of the belief that it can work (again, for some patients), mostly because I've had success controlling migraines with similar distract-the-nerves techniques (application of a cooling agent to pressure points around the head). I still want my Advil, but the menthol oil stuff really does help and I didn't think that it would.

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.