acupuncture and phytotherapy |

Shennong and the history of Ancient China
It seems to me that it is quite logical to ask since when the Chinese began to use herbal medicine, because probably, humans resorted to herbal medicine before coming to China. [I] In any case when humans began to occupy the Asian territory they were obliged to know the effects of local plants in order to be able to treat their ailments.
Although it is not possible to define the exact beginning when the Chinese began to use local medical drugs, the legend of the beginning of Chinese materia medica goes back to a farmer with supernatural powers who lived around 4700 years called Shennong. [Ii]
However Shennong is not the only deity from Chinese mythology associated with the origin of agriculture. There were other deities as Houji (Lord Millet or sovereign Millet) Houtu (Earth God), among others. [Iii]
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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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Cupping consists in the use of domes (in the West are very common glass domes) to which the air is removed by suction or combustion, decreasing its internal pressure and creating a vacuum. When you create a partial vacuum within the dome, it is placed in contact with the skin by sucking the tissue with which it comes into contact.

Currently this therapeutic method is used to treat a series of problems such as abdominal pain, joint pain, headache, cough, back pain, dysmenorrhoea, boils, ulcers or bites of poisonous snakes.

At its birth the cups didn´t have so many clinical applications as today. The first written record of them was made by Chinese herbalist and alchemist, Ge Hong (281-341 AD) and had a single clinical indication: draining pustules/purulent lesions. Neither were made of glass or bamboo. The first cups were made from animal horns. Its Chinese name means jiaofa “technique of the horn.”
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