When was the last time another human touched your body and told you they could feel the pain?

Told you that you just need to relax, and let them take care of it?

It sounds real homo when I say it like that, but I am absolutely serious.

I don't think the needles or Chakras actually do or mean anything, but there is real value in just having another human caring about your pain and telling you it will get better.

When a family member was starting chemo for cancer, we went to a Chinese medicine practitioner who was White. He did a thorough medical history and sold us some capsules which she took and had very little issue with nausea during the entire process. I don't know if it was the capsules or not but she had much less nausea than most chemo patients.

Chiropractic can definitely help with backache and other musculo-skeletal issues much more than MDs. However avoid any chiropractor who suggests that he can help with chronic conditions like asthma or high blood pressure. Those are probably quacks.

Traditional Chinese Medicine classifies dis-ease, and the herbs and foods that heal them, in very different manners.

With this, practitioners can open or close channels within the body, move qi around the body, dispel toxin, increase fluids, etc.

TCM labels each herb or food with a characteristic, for example, dispels heat, increases qi, increases yin (upward flow) increases yang (downward flow) of energy in the body. It's very real, and very effective. Google your favorite fruit or vegetable and TCM characteristics, you will learn a lot.

Meridians and acupuncture are very real. They were known about by ice age humanoids (see Otzi) many eons ago.

There are more acupuncture systems than just Chinese too, there are Korean and Japanese variants as well.

Same goes for Ayurveda, though that gets more into the astrological and medical component of the soul which inhabits the body (vata, pitta, kapha)

Do a little digging on it.

It is imperative that humans unlearn 99% of what Western Medicine taught us.

The only way chiropractic "works" is if you keep paying for "adjustments" weekly for the rest of your life. Seems like a lousy cure.

I cannot speak to acupuncture, but I can to chiropractic care - going again Friday. It has helped a lot with some compression issues and misalignment due to stupid shit I did when I was younger. The trick with chiropractic care is that it must be done repeatedly to garner realignment and then a taper-off. It's taken years to fuck it up, it takes more than an adjustment or two to correct it.

I have no facts or data to back it up, but anecdotally I can say acupuncture works for pain relief.

I had a serious injury that left me needing leg and back surgery, which in turn left me bed ridden for much of year. I had a ton of back pain from being bedridden during the layup, and then using muscles not used in ages getting back up and moving again during rehab. The docs did nothing but throw pills at me which I didn't want to rely on. I gave acupuncture a try on a long shot, and I got great relief from it.

I was told that the micro punctures stimulated the body's natural healing process. I don't know about that, I suspect since it was back pain from months of being immobilized the needles somehow stimulated some nerves that caused chronically twisted and tightened muscles to relax. Or it could have been a placebo effect. I don't know. But it worked well.

I would on the other hand would not expect it to work for any other benefit.

I once hurt my knee working out (I believe I tore some muscle.) It was not healing properly and I went to several places etc but the pain was not going away. After about 4 months of pain I finally tried Chinese medicine. They gave my this stinky brown liquid to spray on my knee and I went for acupuncture and massage 2 times a week. They did acupuncture not only on my knee but also down my spine etc. After 4 sessions my knee was completely healed. I dont even try to understand why, but it was verge of miracle type stuff in my mind. Not even strong pain killers had helped up to that point.

I believe in the placebo effect, and that it is a greater effect than can be explained with simply "they are just confused". But I think trying to weild it is like trying to use religion as a tool. There is at least as much power in religious beliefs but if you pray instead of taking medicine you need you will die.

I think that the power of religion is also not well understood and 99% of religious claims are bullshit and so are 99% of "alternative medicine" and "alternative spirituality" claims. Some are people being superstitious and attributing good or bad results to actions erroniously. Some are people trying to sell you crap or manipulate you. And some are just trolls trying to fuck with you, like the people telling you to tape onions to your feet.

Before you turn to any of that you should fist put the effort into being a healthy weight, doing some regular excercise to have tone muscles and release anabolic steroids regularly, suplement vitamin D in the winter and have regular compasionate human contact.

Hot and cold foods. If you are not familiar.. Asian countries (not strictly Chinese) believe that foods have another property they call hot or cold. Citrus foods like oranges (but maybe not all citrus) are hot, watermelon is cold. I think apples are cold. You can and should eat a balanced diet and/or regulate your temperature keeping this food property in mind.