acupuncture and phytotherapy |

One of the traumas of acupuncturists today is knowing whether acupuncture, that they practice, is only a placebo or have real value and to what extent is it negative just being a placebo. For some months I have walked around with this issue and would like now to share my doubts with the reader.

I will present the data as inconclusive and raise several questions. Unlike other texts I have not yet a fully formed opinion and would like to raise issues for discussion and develop them into future texts.

One of the first problems that arise on placebo is in the history of Chinese medicine. Today modern science has developed tools that allow us to distinguish between placebo effect and real effect of a given drug or therapeutic strategy. However, for the Chinese the placebo effect must always have seemed a real clinical effect.
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It is impossible to speak about Chinese medicine without someone talking about holism. And obviously that after speaking about holism they necessarily have to criticize Western medicine … because of it´s lack of holism. After all doctors see patients in five minutes … and are obnoxious, some of the time. Fortunately they don´t do cardio thoracic surgery in 5 minutes.
What people have no idea is that most often are confusing empathy with holism are not even bothering to examine the conditions under which the different health professionals work.
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