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Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

In Chinese medicine, the concept of 'QI' is roughly translated as the bodies organizational electric energy.

You can see an example of the qi directing an embryos morphogens to create a facial structure here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VULjzX__OM

A great reference for anyone wanting to know how the ancient concepts link of with modern medicine and anatomy should check out the book 'The spark in the machine', recently released in the past year or so.

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Retrofitting to legitimize.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense.

They did the best they could at the time, and with a few correct facts they were half right about the outcome but just made up the how to please their leader/church.

That applies to everything pre-modern medicine?

Are you sorry for not saying why this is nonsense?

The book is actually based on a scientific viewpoint with quite a large section of medical publication references at the end (ex [1]).

If you are a dedicated rationalist I challenge you to at least read the first few chapters and then consider that , with a small chance, we as humans might not know everything about the human body and how it functions through the lense of western medicine.

Edit: added link to Growth Control Theory paper

[1]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024320500...

I don't think any student of western medicine thinks that the medical profession knows everything about the human body. That's why there are new drugs and treatments coming out all the time, after all. But just because we don't know everything doesn't mean that we should abandon empiricism.

I don't know everything there is to know about how a car is built, but I'm not going to assume that dwarves carve their way through the floor of the factories to finish up the parts I'm unaware of.

I see the parallels you are trying to make, but I think the human body is orders of magnitude more complex than a car, and its still possible that we don't know everything about how electricity functions inside us - how it influences our development from a single cell jumping through millions of years of evolution.

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