I used to falling asleep at night with needles in my face. One needle placed superficially in the inner corners of each eyebrow, one per temple, one in the middle of each eyebrow above the pupil, a few in the nose and mouth. I would wake up hours later, the hair-thin stainless steel pins having been surreptitiously removed by one of my parents. Sometimes they would forget about the treatment and in the morning we would look for needles in my pillow. My left eye, which was very farsighted, gradually became slightly farsighted, and my right eye, which was slightly nearsighted, finally achieved a perfect score at the optometrist. By the time I was six years old, my glasses had disappeared from the photo albums.
The story of my restored sight was the first thing I thought to mention when people found out that my parents are TCM specialists and asked what I thought of the practice. It was a concrete and rather miraculous firsthand experience, and I knew what it meant: beginning to see the world more clearly while under the care of my mother and father.
Otherwise, he rarely knew what to say. I would remember hearing TCM mentioned in connection with “poor evidence” or “poorly designed studies” and feel challenged to offer any defense for a line of work that is considered illegitimate. I would feel an obligation to uphold Chinese medicine as a way to protect my parents, their care, and their efforts, but also an urge to resist assuming that obligation for the sake of someone else’s fleeting curiosity and perhaps entertainment.
Most of all, I wanted to have a better understanding of TCM, even just for myself. Now that I work in machine learning (ML), I am often struck by the parallels between this cutting-edge technology and the ancient practice of TCM. For one thing, I can’t quite explain any satisfactorily.
It’s not that there are no explanations of how the field of Chinese medicine works. I, and many others, simply find the theories dubious. According to both classical and modern theory, blood and qi (pronounced “chi,” variously interpreted as something like steam) move and regulate the body, which itself is not considered separate from the body. mind.
Qi flows through channels called meridians. The anatomical charts that hang on the walls of my parents’ clinics show meridians marking the body in sharp, straight lines, from the chest to the fingers, or from the waist to the inner thigh, superimposed on diagrams of bones and bones. organs. At various points along these meridians, needles can be inserted to clear blockages, improving the flow of qi. All TCM treatments ultimately revolve around qi: acupuncture removes unhealthy qi and circulates healthy qi from outside; medicinal herbs do it from the inside.
In my parents’ charts, the meridians and acupuncture points are represented like a subway map and seem to float slightly upward, loosely tied to the recognizable shapes of the intestines and joints below. This visual mismatch is reflected in science; little evidence has been found for the physical existence of meridians or qi. Studies have investigated whether the meridians are special conduits for electrical signals, but these experiments were poorly designed—or if they are related to fascia, the thin, elastic tissue that surrounds almost every internal part of the body. All this work is recent and the results have not been conclusive.
In contrast, the effectiveness of acupuncture, particularly for ailments such as neck disorders and low back pain, is well supported in modern scientific journals. Insurance companies are convinced; most of my mother’s patients come to her for acupuncture because she is covered by the national insurance plan of new zealand.
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