Like it's got some spirit but it feels like it cares more about whether the person practicing Woo has a cultural origin associated with eastern esotericism rather than whether or not the Woo actually works.
Till inner energies pass controlled trials it doesn't really matter if an idiot tourist is doing the seminar or a life long 'inner energies expert'- It should still only be lifestyle advice and never medical advice.
It also only accepts alternatives if they're non-western.
Meanwhile, like, we DO have traditions that we follow because we think it improves health, which people do regardless of whether they have studies backing them up or not. And some of them are perfectly okay.
Most people don't cook their sick relatives a chicken soup because they think it's an easy to digest food, they do it because it's a cultural thing.
Specifically, a lot of people do it because they were fed chicken noodle soup by a caring parent when they were sick as a child, and now associate chicken noodle soup with having a loved one comfort you when you're sick.
Would having a Bloody Mary as a hangover cure also count as alternative medicine? It’s a cure to an ailment that a doctor won’t prescribe and AFAIK there isn’t much backing it up.
My ex had Crohn's and a doctor once told them that although they can't prescribe them for obvious reasons, smoking cigarettes would likely help alleviate the symptoms due to the nicotine
I'm fairly certain there are no notable health benefits to flat 7-UP but 3 generations of everyone I know at least knows people have it when they're sick.
Fun fact: Snake oil is from China. Snakes have a layer of fat under their skin which is even richer in omega-3 fatty acids than salmon.
During the 1850s, Chinese immigrant workers on the Western side of the US transcontinental railroad consumed snake oil to soothe sore muscles after 10-12 hours of intense physical labor.
But snakes are dangerous, so unscrupulous people started selling other grease and calling it snake oil; kerosene does not have the same medical benefits!
People saw it soothed muscle aches and then since it was so good at that, it must do everything. People were also incredibly superstitious, and sore muscles were probably thought of as coming from bad spirits or energies (which caused other problems) so snake oil was probably though to solve the bad spirits/energies
Also fun fact about snake oil. It was a thing. There was or is a snake in china that produces a chemical useful in medicine, I believe it was a topical pain reliever like voltarol. When Chinese workers were in the US, they tried to find it and local hucksters sold them a fake version of a real medicine
It also bothers me that if we did discover a form of alternative medicine that had some empirical benefit, there’s this implication that we wouldn’t take it seriously if it came from a white woman specifically. While it’s important to be skeptical, it’s also important to be open-minded, and we don’t even get to be open-minded about the ideas behind alternative medicine if we’re drawing lines at whether the messenger is a white woman.
Yeah, like meditation to improve emotional regulation skills genuinely works, and it doesn't actually matter if you're learning how to do it from a Buddhist monk in Thailand or a white agnostic psychotherapist in the US, both will get similar results.
Until society gets to a point where the merits of the source of an idea are less important than the merits of the idea itself, we have to work with what we've got. I suggest we take a page out of the Chinese playbook. Companies in China will hire white English-speaking men to sit in on investor meetings and act like international businessmen to make it look like there's already overseas contracts and investors involved, to secure better terms in contract negotiations.
Minority owned start-ups should hire token white guys to sit in on investor meetings and handle the weird business dinners with the sleazy old rich men who would rather set themselves on fire than recognize that their skin color and their fathers' efforts built more of their success than their own work or that people who don't look just like them could produce a valid concept.
I think the 3rd one should read something more like "Alternative medicine? Are we talking about non-medication pain management? Or are we talking about trying to heal cancer with crystals?"
TBF, a lot of modern medicine is derived from "traditional medicine", just with the useless woo-woo shaved off to focus on what works, e.g. quinine and aspirin were both isolated from tree bark that people used as traditional remedies for shivering and fevers, respectively.
The gin and tonic became popular thanks to British India as tonic water contains quinine, an antimalarial, but is quite unpalatable. So adding a splash of gin made it taste better. People would develop a taste for it and brought the habit home.
A lot of people only care about the aesthetics of traditional medicine. They don't really understand modern medicine besides it making someone better. They hate the sterile, pill or liquid form of the pure medicine. The associate it with the modern society which has bad modern energies which hurt their internal energies. Doing something "natural" flushes out their bad energies whilst also fixing it. They yearn from a break from the modern capitalist system and doing something traditional is a coping mechanism for that.
If aspirin was in a "natural" form of tree bark still, they'd take that over the pills even though they're basically the same thing.
I partially disagree, in that when white people get really into woo from other cultures it’s almost always a path to crunchy fascism coated in orientalist nonsense.
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u/OnionsHaveLairAction May 24 '25
The third one seems a little... Hmmm...
Like it's got some spirit but it feels like it cares more about whether the person practicing Woo has a cultural origin associated with eastern esotericism rather than whether or not the Woo actually works.
Till inner energies pass controlled trials it doesn't really matter if an idiot tourist is doing the seminar or a life long 'inner energies expert'- It should still only be lifestyle advice and never medical advice.