@UntimelyRippd Thoughtful article on the waxing and waning of the practice of Acupuncture in Chinese culture and current use.

The 'nine needles' comprised the arrowhead needle for superficial pricking, the round needle for massaging, the blunt needle for knocking or pressing, the three edged needle for puncturing a vein, the sword-like needle for draining abscesses, the sharp round needle for rapid pricking, the filliform needle, the long needle for thick muscles and the large needle for puncturing painful joints.

The main needle now used for acupuncture is the filliform as most of the others have been replaced by more sophisticated surgical instruments, for instance, the sword-like needle has been replaced by the scalpel.

Diabetes is an interesting example for the foundational argument of western medical philosophy being superior to eastern philosophy. Chinese herbology is closer to western term pharmacology the use of plant, animal and mineral as treatments to achieve or maintain health. The discovery of using an animal product as a treatment for diabetes by a western scientist was less than 100 years ago. Trial and error with systematic observation led to the the discovery of injecting a dog pancreas extract to effect "sweet urine" and increase the length of life. The hubris of classifying all types of diabetes within the treatment methodology for type I diabetes (insulin dependent) and blood sugar control as the primary medical goal for diabetic treatment may be contributing to the high incidence of certain fatal complications due to high level of systemic insulin. Time and further studies will fill in the bigger picture to improve medical outcomes and prevention for all classifications of diabetes.

TCM medical conditions were not based on ICD-9 or 10 (international classification of disease) terminology. Straight forward comparisons are not always easy. Description in Chinese texts of Xiao-ke (wasting and thirsting) and Tang-niao-bing (sugar urine illness) were probably referring to of types of diabetes. A few of the monitoring methods for effectiveness of treatment was observing the changes in attractiveness of urine to ants (level of sugar) and odor changes in urine and breath (ketones).

The lack of a current tool to measure and quantify something is not the same as lack of existence. Qi is more likely to be defined in western terms by physics than health sciences.

#1.1
there are no anatomical "lines of energy" -- a phrase that doesn't even have meaning in English, whatever it might have meant in the original Chinese.

etc.

TCM might have accidentally stumbled upon various effective therapies through trial and error, just as Western herbalism discovered many effective treatments, but much of the body of "theory" upon which TCM rests is random superstition, indistinguishable from various western flavors of quackery (e.g. "imbalance of humours") that we might classify as "Traditional Western Medicine".

None of which commentary necessarily represents a defense of western medicine and the scientific enterprise that buzzes behind it (search "Ioannidis findings false" for a real eye opener, one of the most important scientific papers of that last 50 years), but anyone with Type I diabetes is going to die, and die soon, if not treated with insulin -- a therapy that would have been utterly impossible to derive under the epistemological framework underpinning TCM, and that is pretty damned hard to apply with maximum effectiveness in the absence of regular blood glucose monitoring. (Long before western science developed accurate glucose tests, TWM practitioners had developed the straightforward assay for confirming a diabetes diagnosis: They tasted the urine. If TCM practitioners never got that far, I'm unimpressed.) Even in the modern western treatment context, Type I diabetes slices 10 to 15 years off the lifespan of the typical sufferer, to say nothing of quality-of-life compromises -- but that's a big improvement over 100 years ago, when it sliced 50 to 90 years off the lifespan of the typical sufferer.