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Cultural
Relativism
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Chiropractic
- which literally means "done by hand" - was invented
by Daniel Palmer in Davenport, Iowa in 1895.
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Whether
it is an undercurrent or a propelling force, the essence of
all these threads seems to lead to a loss of standards for
thought and action, and a disregard of intellectual discipline.
Cultural
relativism was born in the early twentieth century, in the
innocence of academic fairness and objectivity. Its intent
was to omit prejudice and emotion in the investigation of
other cultures. Previously, observers used pejorative terms
such as "quaint," "backward," "primitive," "pagan," "savage."
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One of my family's holdovers was that fever came from
toxins built up in the colon -- a notion familiar to turn-of-the-century
scholars.
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Relativism
raised cultural anthropology from biased emotionality of supercultures
and superraces to realistic, judgment-free, academically productive
understandings. It allowed an appreciation for the healthy
diversity of human cultural evolution.
But
cultural relativism became inappropriately applied to medical
systems as if they merely reflected cultural differences instead
of being approaches that were more or less useful for increasing
health and longevity. Judgment-free
description of the system replaced the system's objective value
to health. In relativistic schemes, the number of days of illness,
numbers and sizes of epidemics, mortality rates, life spans,
cure rates, misery, and pain are all ignored.
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Alan
examines a dense map of meridian lines and pressure
points relied on by acupuncturists.
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The
measure of a medical system became how well it helped the culture's
functioning and cohesiveness.
This
disconnect persists despite scientific data about modern biomedicine's
obvious objective benefits. Worthless and harmful traditional
remedies are rationalized as being just "different," "alternative,"
"traditional," "unorthodox." Acupuncture, for example, is
rationalized by saying "if it has worked for three thousand
years, there must be something to it." But "worked" is never
quantitatively defined. Cultural relativism results in a blindness
to folkways' untoward consequences in favor of "nonjudgmental"
description.
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