3 Articles One Way, One Article the Other Way

Here are three recent articles about acupuncture, each trying to explain it in Western terms. They all agree that acupuncture is effective, and therefore has been effective for three or four thousand years--but they will not grant that the ancient Chinese sages actually knew what they were doing, that acupuncture does what the practitioners say it does, balance chi, nourish chi, remove toxic chi, and that there is a system of meridians running throughout the body. Why? Because all of these things are invisible, like the wind that we can feel, of which we can see the effects, but the essence of which we cannot see. No one would say that the sensation of wind is a placebo. You will note the classic scientific Catch-22 in the Wall Street Journal article--Dr. Ernst wants a clear study done, which will require someone to prove conclusively that Chi exists--that is, to make it visible.

But like the discovery of X-Rays, it is not a matter of making the invisible visible, but rather labeling what is already known.

Nevertheless, the Western scientific mind simply cannot reverse the flow of this methodological river of compartmentalizing and reducing reality to the smallest components. The rule of Occam's Razor applies only to a certain point, that point being the preservation of specialties and expertise, and monopoly of paradigm. As most lay people know, however, there is plenty of room for both Eastern and Western medicine. We're just that ill.

Occasionally though, you find the renegade scientist whose mind tends to unify data rather than compartmentalize data. And whenever that happens, questions on the nature of consciousness arise, consciousness as part and parcel of the entire universe, when considering the implications of the findings.