The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Acupuncture Improves Osteoarthritis, Trial Shows (Reuters, 12/20/2004) (link retired)
They were also assigned to 23 sessions of traditional Chinese acupuncture or sham non-piercing acupuncture over the course of 26 weeks, or to a control group that received 6 two-hour education sessions over 12 weeks.
Acupuncture does provide benefits, but very much in the way that current western medicine provides benefits, which is not very well. (The standard for health improvement with current medicine is very low.) In my theory I explain how the nervous system assigns all sensations to either pleasure or pain as it they are “represented” by nerve cells. The pain side of the scale is on the stress side of the scale. Acupuncture is a different system that observes very subtle changes that can be made by adding stress (always stress!) to points on the body that have some kind of relationship to a problem. All of the cells are close together early in infancy in a nervous system, but with cell differentiation and growth the cells that were close enough to signal each other without the differentiation retain connectivity but without the same meaning as in earlier development, but still the basic unit of stress is the same throughout the nervous system so that such communication could be achieved in the way that acupuncture is practiced. You just have to change the explanation of why it works as explained in Chinese medicine. And some of the symbolism in this practice is very close to the truth about the nervous system. Yin and yang is the same as pleasure and pain in that everything is one or the other as represented in the nervous system.
After eight weeks, participants in the true acupuncture group had a 10.77-point improvement in a standard osteoarthritis function score, significantly greater than those in sham acupuncture group (7.84-point improvement) or the education-only group (5.30 points).
Notice how the improvement is very small - just a few points above placebo. This is not a significant gain. It is because they are treating a problem caused by stress by adding more stress. (Consider the possibility that stabbing somebody could be a stress, perhaps.) The feeling that you get when the needle hits the right spot is a burning sensation. This is an indication of the creation of stress as "hot" is on the stress end of the scale and "cool" on the opposite.
After 26 weeks, both pain and function scores were significantly more improved in the true acupuncture group than in the sham group.
The lack of pain will improve function without structural change, so a declaration of the improvement of function could be an illusion here. They don't give any numbers here in reporting the “significant” improvement after 26 weeks, so there is no indication that it is any better than the couple of points over placebo that were mentioned before. (In the current medical climate a couple of points over placebo are considered significant, even when the number of people who do worse is greater than the difference between the number of people improved and the number of people improved with placebo. This is always an opportunistic use of statistics.)
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
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This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
