Battlefield Acupuncture for US Troops

Yes, we are already down the road of crazy with the title. But go to this link, just so we can both believe that this is a true thing.

Ok, so now that you believe me, let's ask some questions. First, why is this just for wounded troops? Will acupuncture work on uninjured troops? Can you relieve the pain of getting shot by sticking a needle in your earlobe? Imagine the super soldier with no armor, but a crazed pincushion hedgehog look.

Speaking of hedgehogs (the mini British equivalent of a porcupine), couldn't you just strap a couple of hedgehogs to a pair of earmuffs and cure all your ills and stop all pain? Instead of sham-wow, why not a needle-wow?

Remember that post on placeboes or even chiropractors. You will find that I like being a pin cushion. It did help me with the pain I experienced from diabetes. Of course it never cured me. The acupuncturist never divined the fact that the pain was a symptom of diabetes.

Let me qualify something. The acupuncture I had was either smack dab into a nerve or it was placed around muscles that were then shocked to cause them to rhythmically contract. This is not pseudoscience, it is really doing something to my body. It did give relief, as does massage in similar places. Did the pain stop because I had a delay in diabetes? No, just unlocked a muscle or interrupted the pain via the nerve.

So, imagine my surprise when I see that the emergency battlefield acupuncture they are using is of the ear variety. Simply the ears are mapped to the rest of the body. You can poke a pin into an ear and heal the heart, lungs, legs, etc. There are schools of thought that there are similar areas on the feet and hands that also map to the rest of the body.

The only needles I had in my hand was to reduce pain in my hand. I am all right with that, though less so now that I have controlled the diabetes and most of the pain is now gone.

Back to needles in the ear. I am unsure how this all started, but my guess is that there were folks that had chronic pain but really couldn't be running around looking like a human pin cushion. Why not put pins in the ears and the placebo effect kicks in and we get a similar result? Ipso facto, as they say, ear-based acupuncture was born.

So, let's just say that acupuncture in the ear is indeed a placebo. But if that is true, are bullets perhaps a nocebo? It makes sense. If a placebo can't cure anything that we can't imagine away, then the primary illness should be purely mental illness. We are told that bullets will hurt us, we believe they would hurt us, thus we believe we can eliminate the pain of a bullet with a placebo. Circular logic is fun!

I really don't believe all this bunk about the pain of bullets being curable with needles in your ears. I have gone out to the woods to shoot big guns at furniture. Furniture is not sentient and not susceptible to the placebo effect. I also do not imagine that acupuncture could ever put a sleeper sofa back together after being hit by a dozen shotgun blasts and about sixty rounds of .223 slugs.

I don't want you to believe that I am against battlefield acupuncture. This is far from the truthiness of the underlying issues because placeboes do in fact work. That is why we have the placebo effect, duh! The only issue I have is that you need to do an intelligence or rather a gullibility test prior to treatment.  This  is not always going to be easy. The patient must also be couscous so that they believe they are being helped.

Imagine waking up in a field hospital with a hole in your chest and twenty needles in your ears!

So you see, I am all for soldiers as pincushions. We must be careful of how we do this and be ready with real painkillers the moment they figure out this is pseudoscience.

Here is a quote to give you an idea about the placebo effect : "Acupuncture doesn't work for all of her patients; however. About 15 percent do not respond to acupuncture, Major Simpson said..." As you can see, at least 85% of our military has a good imagination.

One last thought. Will putting pressure on a bleeding wound stop blood loss better when the patient is awake? Is this acupuncture's nephew, acupressure? Inquiring pseudoscientists want to know!

Cracking Spinal Jokes to a Diabetic

I love chiropractors. Really! I just have a hard time letting them near me anymore. They are always cracking me up.

Here is the deal, you move stuff around in the body and stuff happens. Chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, are all manipulation. To a certain extent, they can all cause the body to do stuff that didn't happen before.

But then there are the claims. Chiropractors, or at least mine, claimed that doctors and drug companies were just treating the symptoms of a messed up spine. Really? Hard to say, but cracking my back and paying a lot of money and time did not help. Seemed a bit odd that I never got my money back (pun intended). I even signed up for a health program who's spokesman was Captain James T. Kirk.

Did it help a little? Sure, but no cures and I did exactly what he wanted. Paid in advance too. But that's a ruse by the pseudoscience practitioner. Hard to back out when you have already paid for the service.

Are people truly helped by chiropractors? Yep! But can you say it is because of all that back cracking work? Not definitively. Sorry, not a lot of proof. Devilishly hard to do a double blind study either. Despite the whining of chiropractors, there still isn't 100% success in their profession.

Cracking my knuckles feels good. So does cracking my back. You get a bit of freedom of movement in those joints. With a computer and bad posture, we don't move a whole lot. Chiropractors might help, but so does getting off my butt.

One of my greatest pain complaints is now gone. I had a lot of pain. Huge aching pain. Pain that made it hard to think. A pain that wasn't helped much by the chiropractor, better helped by massage, and even helped by electronic acupuncture, but never stopped. You know what it was caused by? Type 2 diabetes.

Sadly non of these people understand type 2 diabetes. They can't cure it. Sorry. They didn't even diagnose it. A quick blood test and there we go. Controlled diet and good drugs, well, pain goes away. Pretty cool eh? Fail to control diet and take the drugs, look pain. Ah, science.

I love pseudoscience. It is amazing how well it works, when it works. But there is the flaw. Placebos are cool, and some things, even chiropractors, can create physical effects (endorphins from having your head twisted are cool), but they are not necessarily cures. For all my chiropractor's talk of others treating the symptoms and not the cause, he was just treating my symptom. Go figure.

The key reason for this blog and the book is the understanding of why we believe in silly stuff. The problem of course is that silly stuff often works. People swear by magnets, voodoo dolls, and chiropractors. They can all have effects either from pure mind, or a real effect that is just confused with others or pure chance. The lesson here is that it is often hard to tell.

It is also a good idea to go out and buy a glucose meter. Go to a doctor if you want, but a glucose meter will tell you if you have type 2 diabetes. Read the instructions, read the literature, and test. It won't kill you, but it might save you. Most of us don't understand that effect of the food we eat. Seeing your blood sugar skyrocket after a happy meal or a bag of chips will wake you up.

Want to hear some great pseudoscience from your doctor? The fasting blood sugar test is hokum. It will only show that you are diabetic, not on the edge of diabetes. The only way to see if you body is on the slippery slope of type 2 is if you do a glucose tolerance test. The problem of course it that this takes time and money. Problem with that is that you are already in trouble if a doc sends you off for this test. I'd say get one every year after you are 35. I'm not a doctor, but I wish I had at least a hemoglobin A1c test instead of all those semi-worthless fasting blood sugar tests that failed to catch pre-diabetes.

If you don't want to go as far as a meter, read the diabetic symptoms (throw in weird achy muscle pain because that is often missed because it is rare). If you already have them, well too late, but at least you can take some action. Don't just treat the symptoms. Find the cause. Also, get a second, third, and forth opinion.

There is pseudoscience everywhere, even at your doctor's office. My doc missed the obvious symptoms of type 2 until the blood tests came back. Doctors are human, not infallible. They are influenced by education, drug companies, and even the psychology of the examination room. Sometimes real science is second banana to gut feelings, long held beliefs, influence of others, and a sprinkle of hokum.

Twenty million or more people in the US have diabetes. Half don't even know it yet. We don't really know why, but it is partially genetic, and part diet. Odds are pretty good that if you are over 45 you are either a type 2 diabetic or on your way. That's science, don't ignore its possibilities.