Actually, bloodletting IS a good therapy...for certain forms of illness. It just isn't a good therapy for all forms of illness, which is where the "leeches" of earlier western medicine went horribly wrong.

My father is presently getting some blood taken out at regular intervals (every 3 months, I think), in order to relieve some blood condition that was making him quite sick. I believe it's a situation of too much iron build-up in the blood. If some of the old blood is removed, then the body manufactures new plasma which is absolutely free of the iron, thus lowering the iron content in the blood overall.

I believe there are also some other health problems which are relieved by occasional bloodletting.

This all falls under the category of conventional western medicine, not alternative treatments.

So the problem with the leeches was not that they bled people, but that they tried to make it a panacea...rather as present day doctors have tried to make the use of prescription drugs a panacea...with the encouragement, of course, of the pharmaceutical companies.

Graham, unless you were there personally observing all that testing and experimentation by all those people in those labs which you allude to, and unless you were also thoroughly educated in the technical aspects of what you were observing...your opinion is based on faith. As is virtually everyone else's opinion.

We all have faith in what seems most plausible to us. The only thing more powerful than that faith is direct experience, accompanied by accurate knowledge of what is actually happening.

One person may see a light bulb turned on and say "It's a miracle!" Another may see it happen and say "It's black magic!" Another sees it happen and says "It's electricity." They are all calling it what their own life experience has prepared them to call it. But do any of them REALLY know what it is...?

Just cos people have a convenient word for something, by golly, they think they know what it is. Usually they have only a fragmentary idea of what it is, if any idea at all. If they're used to it, they accept it, and think nothing of it. If they're not used to it, they look upon it with astonishment, curiosity, fear, or even complete denial. In these ways do people react to perfectly legitimate medical treatments with which they are (so far) unfamiliar.

But if an authority they already TRUST tells them it's okay...then they usually accept it on faith.

- LH