Similarly, I also think the concepts of "wind," "damp" and "heat" found in Chinese herbalism as the basis for explaining diseases are complete garbage...
Similarly, quarks, which make up all elementary particles except electrons and the Higgs boson, come in six flavors. Needless to say, you cannot taste them. The six flavors are up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. These names are not quite meaningless, but they certainly don't mean what we usually associate with these terms. The top and bottom quarks originally had the alternate names of "truth" and "beauty" (the initial letters are the same), but this turned out to be a little much even for the physicists. Quarks are bound together by gluons, which despite their name, are not elementary particles of glue. Quarks and gluons also have colors: red, green, and blue, as well as their opposites. For this reason, the theory that describes the interaction of quarks and gluons is known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Yet none of these names correspond to what we associate them with in our ordinary experience; for example, quarks and gluons don't have any color at all in the sense that we know color. Physicists just needed names for things that had never been described before, and so they picked these.
Similarly, the names used in Chinese medicine for various organ systems and condition may be the same words that we associate with ordinary phenomena, but that is not how they are used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Similar to quantum physics, the developers of this system had no words to describe the phenomena they were studying, so they used ordinary words that conveyed some of the meaning. But "wind" in Chinese (and Tibetan) medicine in no way corresponds to any wind that we would normally experience.
I've mentioned my friend who is currently being treated in Asia. One of the diagnoses she has consistently received is "cold kidneys". Now to a Westerner, this sounds patently ridiculous. Her kidneys are the same temperature as the rest of her body, and her doctors know that. "Cold" here means something very different from its standard meaning, and it is not easy to put into other words. Furthermore, in TCM, "kidneys" do not just refer to the organs we know as kidneys, but to a whole organ system that includes both kidneys as a single unit, as well as the ears, the sense of hearing, and the control of the bones, teeth, nervous system, hair on the head, hair on the reproductive organs, neurological tissue and the brain. So "cold kidneys" is a rather complex condition that has very little to do with the words used to name it.
Meanwhile, she's being treated for cold kidneys (among other things) and getting better, while I'm not.
...just as the European idea of disease being caused by an imbalance in the four temperaments of sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic are garbage.
in this section, "alternative", im only interested in discussing with people who feel the efficacy, of chi etc, is already established, i.e. how can get the best out of it rather than whether it even exists or not. thats not to say that i wouldn't try to answer some general questions etc, but for the most.
Similarly, herbal medicines are traditionally used alongside acupuncture in the treatment of conditions. So finding someone who has trained in China for many years in both acupuncture and the use of herbal medicines (and practices both) would be ideal.
On a personal level, meditation is a practice that helps develop one's own chi; one of the ways this manifests is that meditation is very good for stabilizing the mind. If one has the interest in it, a full spiritual practice is even more powerful than meditation alone. Neither of these will cure ME, of course, but they can help somewhat, and they certainly make it a lot easier to deal with the illness.