I’ve noticed that, whenever I criticize acupuncture as the quackery based on prescientific mysticism and theatrical placebo that it is, inevitably some who claim to “hate woo” will express *considerable* displeasure.

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Replying to @gorskon
From listening to
@SkepticsGuide I learned that not only is acupuncture a sham (which I knew before) but it was actually made up by the Chinese government about a hundred years ago as a presto culture thing. Too bad many smart people believe the hoax.pic.twitter.com/REM837kCNP
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Replying to @ShaiBiran @SkepticsGuide
Correct. Traditional Chinese medicine is a construct created by Chairman Mao’s government. Its entire history is a retcon.https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/retconning-traditional-chinese-medicine/ …
4 replies 15 retweets 39 likes -
Replying to @gorskon @debbiegoldsmith and
Just a few problems here. First, the Communist Revolution was from 1948-1952. Mao and the Communists were a bit busy fighting a war to promulgate TCM in the late 1940s. Second, the Communist Party in China rejected anything tainted with “traditional” which saw its fullest
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Replying to @jdeamattson @gorskon and
expression during the Cultural Revolution. Next there is evidence for the existence of what would be called “TCM” outside of China prior to the Communist Revolution. Yes, hold TCM to the same rigor we apply to all Medicine, but don’t going revising history to support you end.
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Replying to @jdeamattson @debbiegoldsmith and
OK. I’ll bite. Lay that evidence of “TCM” before Mao out there. Not traditional Chinese folk *medicines* (which I addressed in my post as having existed before), but TCM as a *unified* system of medicine, the way it’s represented now.
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Replying to @gorskon @jdeamattson and
The bottom line is that, before Mao, as
@AlanLevinovitz put it, "there was no such thing as 'Chinese medicine. For thousands of years, healing practices in China had been highly idiosyncratic. Attempts at institutionalizing medical education were largely unsuccessful..."1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
"...and most practitioners drew at will on a mixture of demonology, astrology, yin-yang five phases theory, classic texts, folk wisdom, and personal experience."https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-medicine-origins-mao-invented-it-but-didnt-believe-in-it.html …
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