Colon Hydrotherapy

[dcan]

dcan,

I'm not sure what your stance is on alternative medicine or therapies. But I absolutely know acupuncture works since I've had several treatments in the past. It's funny that not too long ago most people who practice western medicine were skeptics about acupuncture. Now there are more doctors in the United States who are coming around to accept the legitimacy of acupuncture. Several years ago when I was looking for an orthopedic surgeon to do subacromial decompression surgery on my shoulder, I immediately scratched one surgeon off my list because he thought acupuncture was a scam. To me for this doctor to have this opinion at this point in time was extremely closed minded and ignorant. Colon hydrotherapy may not work but to me that doesn't mean all alternative therapies don't?

I think acupuncture has an interesting background, and one I personally would not rule out. I was heavy into Oriental stuff in the late 90s when I studied martial arts, and I studied and practiced Japanese acupressure which has similarities with acupuncture. But it turns out acupressure is really just trigger point therapy, which is really just breaking up fascial knots. Acupuncture is almost certainly based on the same thing, putting needles into fascial knots to break them up. But then add to it some traditional Chinese medicine woo-woo and it becomes something mystical, with 10,000 needles along your chi meridians and whatnot. And yet it is still really just trigger point therapy, practiced by physical therapists around the country now. Although admittedly the Chinese discovered trigger points a few years before the West...

Certainly there is more to the universe than what we understand scientifically, and it is hubris to declare otherwise. But it is equally arrogant to look to alternative therapies before traditional ones that are proven to work. Plus, remember, these "alternative treatments" need a market in order to thrive, and they get that market by preying on the gullible.

A couple months ago I flipped out when I saw a series of signs alongside the road, in the poor section of town no less, advertising "miracle pills" that cure everything from AIDS to syphillis to cancer to lupus to diabetes to depression. They literally claimed a pill that would kill any STD "within 15 minutes on contact". I took down one of the signs, photographed it, and sent it to the state medical examiner's office and the state AG office. No real response but the signs came down. It made me sick that someone was preying on the poor like that, and I hope whoever it was gets a serious legal slap for it.

Cook said it best: They rely on people using magical thinking rather than real thinking. And I'm serious, I completely changed how I look at this stuff after reading that book on Dr. Brinkley. The book isn't about modern stuff, it's a chase story of a man trying to take down a scam artist who I think makes all other scam artists pale in comparison. But reading it I can immediately spot the exact same terminology and arguments used in modern infomercials and ads for this stuff. It's like Brinkley was teleported from the 1920s to today and is still running his scams on a global scale. It's really eerie.