Quote:
Katherine Derbyshire wrote:
I think medicine might be a more useful comparison than the mechanical arts. Mechanical systems are much more predictable and clearly defined than organic systems.
But then consider, say, back pain. Huge numbers of people have it. And study after study has found this or that contributing abnormality. But, for the most part, none of the treatments work.
My position is that martial arts are more like back pain than they are like infectious disease. There is much to be learned about the biomechanical structures involved, but understanding them won't necessarily make you a better martial artist.
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But knowing it won't make you a worse one either ... Tuite application for instance -- saying they are "just muscle spindles and certain nerve plexuses" (which they are) does not make one necessarily better at triggering them in practice -- but knowing that will help nail down anatomically where to locate them -- and how better to manipulate them -- and making training to exploit them far more likely to progress. Sure the old Chinese medicine meridians and acupuncture maps are not irrelevant -- but they have no objectively systemic explanation to offer -- not even in their own terms.
You are not wrong -- medicine is not an inapt comparison for development, and these are early days in any sense of that kind of coherent development. And for what it is worth, foramenal nerve root blocks pretty much work consistently for back pain, not without downsides-- but they almost invariably do work.