acupuncture

[Guest guest]

Sam,

you were wondering about a possible placebo effect.

Acupuncture works on animals as well, in the West it is used on racing

horses with wonderful effects. Now I don't think that the horses are very

much " into acupuncture " .

But more to your original question:

If a patient goes to 10 TCM practitioners with a heavy cold, and he is fine

otherwise, treatment will be the same with all the 10 practitioners. If the

cold is not treated and the patient does not fight it off well, it goes

inside the body. There it invades the organ systems/meridians that are the

weakest. From there it affects the other organs in a certain pattern (see

the 5 Element Theory). After some time (in many cases years and years) has

passed, the patient returns with asthma, allergies, joint pain, etc. There

is not only pattern in this patient now (e.g. spleen deficiency), but

multiple patterns. This is where TCM becomes an art and cookbook approaches

don't go far. As the body is weakened, you have to start with the patterns

that are on the surface, otherwise they sink into the body once a more

internal pattern is removed (this is all theory from a great fellow called

Zhang Zhong Jing who wrote the classic " Treatise on Febrile and

Miscellaneous Diseases " beginning of the 3rd century). TCM is a strategy

of fighting a war against the diseases and their patterns of invading the

body and changing withing the body. As people have studied under different

masters who developed different strategies and also have made their own

experiences of fighting, the attack will be not exactly the same of all 10

fighters (BUT they must adhere to war strategies that are well proven and

make sense). If all 10 win over the enemy, all 10 are right.

Dagmar

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