What's the deal with Chinese/Eastern medicine?

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Is it legitimate?

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Yes. If you eat the heart of a dog you will be granted much strength and vitality.

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powdered rhino horn


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making their penis bigger


Soooooo, got any powdered rhino horn I can borrow?

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If it were true then they wouldn’t still have to blur out their small peens in their porn.

What’s the deal? It’s fake. It’s all the placebo effect.

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rhino horn is made from keratin which is the same thing as our fingernails.

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So that is why I get hard when I chew my fingernails?

Its a racket and entire species will be destroyed this century because of Chinese greed. Environmentalists constantly blast the US and the west for environmental destruction but there has been no greater catalyst for climate change the extinction of entire species than the rise of the Chinese middle class.

Depends what you mean by legitimate.

You really might legitimately feel better after acupuncture treatments, but it would not exactly provide you with a solution that has a clear cause and effect based solution grounded in biochemistry and medicine as understand it.

There is a great deal of art, thought, skill and expertise that goes into the practice. It's just not a process which is well articulated in the western scientific paradigm.

In my experience, the more complicated a problem is (e.g. I also have bone spur drama): the harder it is to solve with exactly 1 tried and true solution. That's when crazy shite that shouldn't even help seem to work surprisingly well.

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have terrible plantar fascitis in my feet, and I'm thinking about acupuncture

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You can go see a foot doctor and get custom insoles shaped to your feet. Takes about 10 minutes and you leave with them. I had the same problem, did that and have never had any issues since. Also makes every shoe extremely comfortable. I've had these for a couple years now with zero issues.

I'm currently getting dry needling done through my physical therapist. Which was described to me as the West's take on acupuncture.

I will say this, it is like 4 minutes of hell...but my neck and back feel 100 times better than before we started this treatment.

For legitimacy's sake, I'm receiving this treatment after being hit by an 18-wheeler. So treating muscle damage from bulging/herniated disc and severe whiplash.

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One of my friends in college was Asian and we were discussing philosophy one day and she told me that "logic is a western concept".

Really changed how I looked at some of their beliefs. Apparently it doesn't matter if it makes no logical sense they will still believe something like powdered rhino horn curing ED or making their penis bigger just because of how the horn is shaped

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That's part of it but another large part of it and this is the case with any old-school wisdoms or tribal societies, it's based on things that work in practice. These ancient cultures didn't have a concept of how things work but they knew what things worked.

Do you care how maggots clean your wounds or why? Do you care how some random plant gets rid of your fever or stomach pains? You only care that they do. It's a practical wisdom that's handed down through generations of trial and error. A lot of people died to get to that point testing shite that didn't work. That's the beauty of Western logic is that we can test and theorize and don't have to make those sacrifices but sometimes we're our own worst enemy and we lose sight of the practical nature of the world and get lost in our own theories.

We're also haughty about our own superiority in this approach and automatically dismiss anything thats not backed by evidence despite the fact that it may work in practice.