After a few days of undergoing “intensive chiropractic therapy,” including daily half-hour-long treatments plus eating the most disgusting Traditional Chinese Medicine (a blend of 7 herbs/roots) three times a day, I feel better than I have in years. I’m still waking up with a slightly sore neck, but this man knows what he is doing. After only three treatments, my shoulders are less sore, which means my muscles aren’t pulling my bones out of alignment. Every day, I get massaged and have a new type of bone treatment applied – crack the neck side-to-side one day – crack the back backwards the next day – crack the head upwards the next day – it’s all rotational, coupled with massage, coupled with medicine that [supposedly] increases the circulation to my muscles, to help them repair faster.
I gotta’ say…this TCM stuff…it’s pretty cool. It’s funny to hear the doctor talk about it, laughing, saying, “You white people have only been doing this kind of stuff for a hundred years, since you learned it from us. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years, and we retain the knowledge from it.” It is this point that I would like to expand upon. Because many people aren’t aware of what I am about to tell you, but they should be: and you all know how I love history.
I’ve always been one to attribute the fall of Rome to the rise of Christianity. I may be putting the cart before the horse with all that, but there is a clear movement from one to the other – right around the time that Christianity came on the scene, Rome was already declining decadently – Christianity was probably just the nail in the coffin. Regardless, the fall of Rome saw the rise of Christianity and its subsequent dominance over Europe for the next thousand-and-a-half-years.
It was right around the middle part of that time period that we often call The Dark Ages. During The Dark Ages, Roman Catholicism did its best to suppress any/all knowledge that wasn’t based in the Bible. Imagine if Europe was like the decade-long Taliban-controlled Afghanistan…only this lasted 500 years. Any advancements recorded by the Greeks and Romans that were left in Europe after 800CE were either vaulted at the Vatican or destroyed.
In fact, the only reason the world has any ancient history of Western Civilization is thanks to the Muslim world, which had its rise right around the time Europe really went off the deep end. While Europe was burning books, Arabs were creating algebra. Before Islam, there was no decimal system. To this day, we use Arabic numerals. Meanwhile, as Europe was squabbling over which version of Christianity was the right one, fighting over land and resources, the Arab world was creating huge advancements in mathematics, agriculture, and architecture. And they also build libraries.
Without those libraries – without the trading that came at the end of the European Dark Ages – no European would have had a clue where to begin a Renaissance. And, even then, they were working off what the Arabs managed to save that Europeans didn’t get the chance to set on fire during their Crusades. Creating medicine would have been like baking a cake off a recipe where all you can read is the oven temperature. The European Dark Ages set us back well-over 1000 years, in terms of global advancement. We could have mines on asteroids right now, if it wasn’t for that. But, I digress.
China did not experience this. Sure, the Qin Dynasty had their book burning issues, but that was in 200BCE! After that, they got their shit together and said, “Maybe setting knowledge on fire isn’t such a good thing for societal advancement.” So, they studied, and they retained what they learned. While I can’t get totally behind all Traditional Chinese Medicine – while I still maintain there are far more effective Western Medicinal Methods – one simply can not deny that 2,000 years of studying how to align the bones/muscles of a body to function properly is ridiculously impressive.
So, I’m sold, at least on Chinese chiropractics. The herbal crap I’m taking…I still don’t know how effective it really is…but if I trust the guy enough to snap my bones into place, I figure I’ll give his apothecaric blend a try. I can’t say how effective the medicine is, but I can say that my neck/spine has not felt this good in years. If anyone has the means, I highly recommend it.
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