I love it when advocates of "alternative" medicine start combining their therapies. Well, I don't "love" it because they are combining two wildly improbable therapies so much as I love it for the entertainment value. Here's one that didn't quite reach the level of craziness needed for Your Friday Dose of Woo but that I can't resist mentioning. It's the combination of the ultimate woo with one of the most popular forms of woo. I have two words for you:
What an excellent combination! They call it "acupoint injection therapy" because they inject homeopathic remedies into acupuncture meridian points:
Dr. Rowe is pleased to announce her certification in Acu-point injection therapy. Homeopathic injection therapy is an effective non-toxic therapy used for pain management, natural facial rejuvenation and mesotherapy. Acu-point injections can also be used for the delivery of nutritional supplements like vitamin C and B12.What makes this system of medicine so remarkably effective is that it is one of the few therapies that is administered directly into the matrix of the body. Medicines that are delivered at this level have a profound effect on the body's regulatory systems. For patients with pain management issues it can provide long term pain relief without the use of steroids or opiates.
Wow! The "matrix" of the body! Funny, but they never taught me anything about the body's "matrix" when I was in medical school other than the extracellular matrix, which is basically connective tissue proteins surrounding the body's various structures and organs. Damn that Western thinking and insistence on science! No wonder I don't understand this:
If the tissue matrix is filled with toxins, the transfer of these necessary components becomes impaired. The goal of homeopathic detoxification therapy is to clean and detoxify the tissue matrix to protect and optimize our systemic functions.
German researchers theorize that acupuncture points are areas on the body that have direct access into the matrix. With this in mind, toxicity in the matrix can be detoxified through acupuncture treatments but also the effectiveness of the acupuncture treatment can be affected by the tissue's toxicity.
I think it'd be really cool to hook into the body's matrix. Maybe it would be like the computer matrix in the Matrix movies, only without Keanu Reeves. It'd be nice to keep Carrie-Anne Moss, though. Hey, I have an idea for taking this "medicine by analogy" even further: "Dis-ease" could be likened to Agent Smith.
This sounds a lot like palliative saline injections. Something which is used on pregnant women, hardly acu-point injection matrix demodulation - whatever!
Where the hell are the regulatory bodies in this realm?
Do they inject distilled water? Isn't that pretty painful?
Of course you can't understand this, Orac. No one can be told what the Matrix is. You've got to experience it for yourself.
When I first saw the phrase "homeopathy and acupuncture," I thought this was going to be about a treatment along one of the following lines:
* The patient gets dripped on his body's meridian points with water that had once had a needle in it (from a volume that now, after multiple dilutions, is roughly equivalent to a minor ocean). Any resemblance between this homeopathy/acupuncture combination and the Chinese water torture would be sheer coincidence.
* The patient gets stuck with needles that have been reduced in thickness to the point that one can no longer see or feel the needles -- to the uninitiated, it just looks as if the acupuncturist is pantomiming the whole business of poking one with needles, rather than using real ones. But as everyone knows, that, of course, would just be silly.
~David D.G.
David D. G., that was too brilliant to let go unpunished.
Needles so fine they cannot be detected? Let us not stop there. Clearly, the idea of infinite refinement of a thing until its presence approaches zero should not be confined only to the instruments or the medication, should it? Not for the truly wooful, I am certain.
Until recent conceptual advances in the implications of Edgar Mitchell's Quantum Hologram Theory of Everything, so ably demonstrated by Adam Faith-healer and others, it was not fully understood that the traditional meridians of the body, used for millenia by traditional healers as a pathway to alleviate pain and cure a host of ills, are in fact each composed of many thousands of micromeridians, or perhaps even millions of nanomeridians. (!!1!)
(It was, of course, investigations at the quantum level of vibrational consciousness, where the resulting variables were applied to String Theory models of multi-dimensionality over an absorption cross-section of toxicity in the human tissue matrix, that led to the revelation that nanomeridians -- heretofore unsuspected -- could explain the sometimes conflicting results that even experienced acupuncturists reported.)
I foresee significant advances for this field in the near future. Imagine, if you will, infinitely fine needles -- so fine they cannot be even felt by the patient -- inserted by sophisticated robotic manipulators, guided unerringly to the correct nanomeridian by the finest magnetic resonance imaging techniques (possibly assisted by nanolaser mapping and location electronics -- or dowsers. No, make that quantum-dowsers).
Imagine the possiblities. Imagine the fees<\b>.
/fantasy
Seriously, I've wondered for a while why the woosters haven't noticed that "quantum"-everything is getting stale, and haven't started using "nano" in its place. Anytime now I guess.
And thanks, David D. G., for triggering the riff.
David D.G. wonderful :)
What I'm going to wait for are the almost certain infections that will result from injecting the bacterial culture sitting in the bottle on the homeopathists shelf the last 2 years before being injected into a human being. Perhaps if they added some thimersol to the solution it wouldn't grow... Do homeopathic solutions have expiration dates? Are you supposed to keep them in the fridge?
But then, I suppose if you don't believe in germs they can't hurt you.
I think it has to be thimerosal diluted to 30C. Since like cures like, perhaps this would mean that homeopathic thimersal would cure autism? I sense a marketing opportunity for the David Geiers of the world . . . .
My understanding of medicine is pretty basic, but isn't sometimes dangerous to inject water into people? And wouldn't injecting a non-sterile solution into someone be potentially dangerous as well? I fail to understand how this can be legal.
Two kinds of pseudoscience at once?
Bah.
Try five.
Uh, but this is a real story.
Any time you insert a needle and inject a foreign substance you risk complications. It happens to all of us physicians at one time or another. We just don't do it intentionally.
For intravenous use, fluids must not only be "sterile" but also "non-pyrogenic", meaning they do not contain any toxins left from certain bacterial cell walls that are not destroyed during sterilization. If the fluid is not "non-pyrogenic" and you inject it into the bloodstream, you can kill a patient, or at least make them very ill.
There's also horseshoe crabs involved, but that's a long story.
Someone is so going to die or be seriously hurt from this treatment if it starts seriously getting used everywhere.
When did that ever stop the woos?