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My interest in the topic limited my search to the first result on Google when "macrobiotic" is the search term. Do send me the literature, though. If there's more to I'm willing to give it the time of day.

That blurb of advice is common sense if you want to recover from illness or remain healthy.

Nightshade vegetables exacerbate certain conditions like arthritis. Healthy individuals shouldn’t have a problem with them. 

Poschy, there is a huge amount of literature on macrobiotics. There are also plenty of poorly written articles and wiki pages about it by people who have no idea what it really is or have never tried it.

No where in macrobiotic literature are things deemed evil.

Last edited by Superior Mind (2020-10-17 05:17:01)

please not this again. if you want to recover from serious illness your best hope is those pesky ‘chemicals’ and inventions of modern medical science. synthesise away, pharmaceutical companies! please, do give me anti-virals and antibiotics! open me up!

let’s not talk about how steve jobs cured his cancer by avoiding nightshade (?) vegetables or whatever the fuck.

‘i’m afraid the cancer has metastasised into your colon and pancreas. the good news is this week we have vegan chilli in the canteen, no red meat, and we’re cutting out all red peppers from now on. you’ll be out in a month!’

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-17 05:23:50)

there's a lot to criticize about 'big pharma' but a lot of the alternative medicine stuff elides with anti-vax and general anti-science.

funny how trump was against the science of covid, climate change, etc, until it directly imperiled his life. then he's right into hospital for the latest and greatest in scientific cures. 'maybe it'll go away', 'it'll get colder'. ok. maybe not.

if someone wants to fight serious illness by aligning their chakras or homeopathy or whatever then good luck to them. i guess it's less of a tax burden.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-17 09:14:05)

yes but diabetes is a metabolic disorder that is tied to diet and health. lots of borderline diabetics can be nudged back into health if you get them active and eating well.

that’s different from saying macrobiotics can treat serious illness.

being in support of provable, repeatable scientific evidence is being 'culturally predisposed' now? nice cant.

as i said, it's really pointless to discuss these things with anyone who is a 'convert'. there are any number of cognitive biases at work, not least placebo effect.

mainstream science, nutrition, medicine and pharmaceuticals is established on the principle of the scientific method. we're talking thousands of repeatable, and indeed repeated, experiments. meta-studies. large datasets and meaningful statistical analysis of trends. that is not 'a cultural disposition' or an 'intolerance'. it's the best method we have.

are you 'culturally predisposed' to mistrust vaccines? no, because that is a nonsense phrase.

if macrobiotics works, it'll be written about in the medical literature, not by cranks on the internet who talk about 'scary chemicals' and 'having zen focus on your chewing'.

i very much doubt that adjusting your diet and doing pilates is going to reverse late-stage cancer and transendothelial migration of cancer cells, but hey, what do i know, i consume 'nightshade' vegetables and live in rank ignorance of macrobiotic wisdom.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-17 11:56:28)

. Based on my personal experience with western medicine, it would have been foolish of me to assume it provided all possible answers and solutions and in fact would have most likely left me nearly dead or dead by now if I hadn’t sought answers elsewhere.

okay, well, if you get covid-19 on one of your walks or develop cancer, disavow that pesky western medicine and rely on your prana to see you through then.

western science doesn't have an 'energy body theory' because there's no evidence of 'body energy' and there's nothing to be usefully done with a metaphor or metaphysical concept.

western philosophy/medicine has understood the connection between one's physical fitness and mental state. mens sana in corpore sano. we understand that these systems are holistic and work in complementarity to one another. but 'chi' and 'prana'? ok if it helps you to imagine balls of glowing energy in your solar plexus or whatever-the-fuck. the next time you get really sick i do take it you'll go to an E.R., though, rather than sitting in transcendental meditation.

i quite agree that someone needs a healthy diet and environment otherwise it's senseless to keep treating the symptoms/effects of disease. but we can still discuss this within the paradigm of western science and rather more boring mechanistic understandings of the human organism. what the fuck does qi have to do with it? are we going to prescribe singing bowls for people with bowel cancer?

is the indian medical system the envy of the world?

that's like arguing for the merits of chinese traditional medicine because it has so many practitioners and adherents. sorry, eating white rhino tusk is not going to make you super virile.

any of the benefits that ayurveda confers could be given in a secular-western context and stripped of the spiritual baggage.  regulating your diet and keeping in shape is not exactly beyond the ken of western science.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-22 18:14:45)

Indians are good people. They will help us in the grand Crusade against Islam.

A pandemic is a small price to pay to see the armies of the Elephant god raze Mecca.

the opioid crisis is a major public healthcare crisis, but it is almost entirely america’s own making. your problem there is rampant and unregulated capitalism. doctors filling scrips from dodgy practices for endless supply of hospital-grade, addictive painkillers? no.

opiates are a major breakthrough and they are useful, and used, in hospital settings the world over, every day. you won’t call them a ‘tragedy’ and advert for chinese traditional medicine when you’re in hospital recovering from surgery. they have many more uses than just palliative medicine for the dying. like how fucking ignorant are you to dismiss a drug that alleviates the suffering of tens of millions of people every day? the significant difference is that opiates are not widely available outside of the hospital setting in most of the rest of the world. forklift drivers don’t go home here and spend 9 months in a percocet haze. this is a problem of the american system’s devising, not ‘western medicine’.

i mean you mention the hippocratic oath. there’s about 1,000 things about the american healthcare system that make a mockery of it. bankrupting someone over an ambulance ride or charging them to hold their newborn baby as part of the ‘deluxe birthing insurance package’ sounds pretty up there.

you can’t mention chinese traditional medicine and opiates in the same breath, though. chinese traditional medicine doesn’t do SHIT. opiates are incredibly useful. you keep talking about these limit cases where ‘i would have died if i only relied on western medicine’: but how many people suffer avoidably or die because they reject western medicine and rely on spurious, unproven, bullshit folk remedies? the next time you’re sick and in serious suffering, say you break a pelvis in a car accident and you are writhing in agony, unable to find comfort whilst it slowly heals, you won’t ask for ginger tea or do tai chi. get fucking real man, jesus christ.

this seriously sounds like a religious faith. you talk about ‘western medicine’ the way scientologists talk about psychology.

western medical practice, for long after hippocrates and into the early modern era, actually had these 'spiritual ideas', too. most of europe up until the age of enlightenment used a theory of bodily humours. it went the same place as our understanding of infectious disease, before knowledge of germs: into the dustbin of history because it had no USE. 'body energy' theories belong in the dustbin with any number of other ancient ideas, like exposing children or leeching/bloodletting the sick. we used to think you got depressed because you had a 'lachrymose humour' or were quick to anger because of 'an excess of bile'; just like we used to think that you got sick by inhaling 'miasmatic' or 'pestilential' air, such as those who lived near swamps or rivers (yes, it’s not mosquitoes, it’s body energy!) neat and poetic ideas but of no use to anybody: particularly when large swathes of the population are frequently being cut down by plagues. how's the acupuncture or hot cupping treatment for covid-19 coming along?

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-23 01:45:18)

medicine already knows this. the way you are portraying western medicine is basically a bad caricature. western medical science KNOWS that diet, fitness, environment, etc, all impact on the person’s health. and, again, speak only for america’s example: general practitioners in the U.K. are equally keen to dispense with lifestyle guidance/dietary advice, pharmaceutical prescriptions and referral to mental health services.

could the integration be better? absolutely. it comes down to funding and organisation, though, not an essential blindspot of western medicine.

and i dismiss chinese traditional medicine because it doesn’t do anything. you would do well to research the placebo effect and any other of about 20 cognitive biases that influence this matter. acupuncture aimed at ‘your qi and flows of energy’ does a sum-total of fuck all. ditto hot cup treatment.

it’s so supremely ironic to be how quick you are to criticise and dismiss opiates and yet you put some highly tendentious value on chinese cures. do you know what a breakthrough it was to find, isolate, synthesise and develop a class of painkillers such as opiates? do you know how many bottomless leagues of human misery, throughout history, were solved by this? imagine falling from a horse in the middle ages and suffering a nasty break to your femur. imagine requiring surgery to remove bullets/buckshot or to amputate a limb aboard a naval ship in the 18th century. do you have any idea how much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and begging for death are implied in these long annals of suffering, pre-opiates and pre-anaesthesia? the only things available to medieval medicine, indeed, was to sublimate the experience of pain into something like a virtue.

and yet you heartily recommend nonsense cures where people go and subject themselves voluntarily to pain.

you’ve got it all backwards i’m afraid. let me know how the qi channelling goes the next time you get toothache.