Hello everyone, I've been meaning to join this board for a long time! I love the show, and I miss my friends from the Freethinkers group I had in university.
So last night, at Cafe Deux Soleil (a cafe/pub where a community I'm a part of comes to perform spoken word and poetry on stage competitively), there were three people talking about acupuncture practice. The advocate talked with a sage demeanour about the merits of the practice, and what exact effects it has. She then took out a pack of acupuncture needles, and, while giving a talk about how "no one knows how it works but it does" (cue wincing at obvious placebo affect) she stuck three needles right in the woman's right hand, all while sitting at a dirty table with food everywhere. Now, real medical practitioners are extremely careful when it comes to puncturing the skin. You wipe the area down with a solution that cleans and sanitises the area, take a needle from a sterilised environment, and then carefully make the puncture. You must do this only in a clean environment. Either dirt or microbes can result in infection and death, a lesson learned kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Many have died from unsterilised acupuncture needles, and many have become paralyzed or numb from accidental nerve damage.
This is what happens when unconfirmed theories are put into practice on the human body, and inconvenient scientific knowledge is neglected. This is what happens when people trust self-help books and salesmen in tiny shops instead of doctors.
I was the scorekeeper that night, so I was too busy writing quick math into my papers and this person had punctured her subject before I even realised she was doing more than showing off her needles. Over the next hour, the woman with the needles carefully clapped, trying her best not to close her hands forcefully over the needles as they lay in specific but apparently random places in her palm, and I finally said, "Careful, this isn't exactly a sterile environment!" to which she replied, "Oh, true, but these needles are so tiny, I doubt even microbes could get in". I said, "........Oh I dunno, microbes are... pretty small!" and she said "Yeah, I'm a nurse, I'll be careful."
I really, truly hope she was lying about her nursehood. I also wish her well. Ever since, I've gotten flack for telling the story among my friends... they're enormously protective of acupuncture and chiropractic here in Vancouver.
