世論 What Japan Thinks

Watching Aru Aru Daijiten (“Encyclopedia of Living” is the official translation) on television last night, they were talking about diagnosing problems with internal organs via acupressure, that is acupuncture pressure points, but just pressing them instead of sticking needles in. Whether on not you accept the medical validity or not (I personally do not), the program did, and presented some rather dubious statistics to back up their thesis, and to top it all off, accompanied it with some extremely poor, almost dangerous, advice.

One of the figures that stuck in my mind was that from their 40 guinea pigs, ordinary members of the public aged from 30 to 50 or so, 18 had pain when pressing either or both of the pressure points associated with kidney problems. These 18 were then given blood tests and six were found to actually have unusually high figures for protein in the urine or other kidney problems. Whilst everyone in the studio was amazed, to me that was just one in three who was correctly diagnosed, and there was not even the simple comparative figure of checking the other 22 to see if more or less than seven had similar kidney problems.

Next, when they did liver problems, they claimed (with no evidence to back up this statement) that with a simple one-minute massage of three pressure points one could metabolise alcohol faster and avoid hangovers!

With the people from the sample above where they had detected kidney or liver problems, after just one week of thrice-daily massage of the pressure points, they showed that on average these people had lowered their cholesterol or other indicators by about 5% to 10%, but failed to mention if these people had in addition changed their diet or started taking medicine.

Finally, my pet hate as a holier-than-thou ex-moderately-heavy drinker, was that when two of the regulars confessed to starting drinking before lunchtime and continuing until late at night on a regular basis, they were treated almost with respect for being so strong, and rather than being advised to cut down, massage of said pressure points was the recommended and sufficient activity. There was also no mention of the most basic disclaimer like “if symptoms persist, please see a doctor.”