Hayley Gardner is a California-based acupuncturist and champion of acupressure, a form of popular and widely marketed theatrical placebo derived from the pseudo-religious idea of “life energy, which flows through [mythical] ‘meridians’ in the body”. The role of the acupressure practitioner is then to apply physical pressure to “acupuncture points” in order to “clear[ing] blockages in these meridians” (note the turn to metaphor at the crucial moment where a medical description would be expected) and “balance the flow of energy – called qi (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qi) – throughout the body to restore and maintain the proper function of body systems.” According to Gardner, “[o]ur bodies run on electricity, just like anything else”, which is … inaccurate and of dubious relevance to anything else she says. Yeah, this is all familiar woo moves – the appeal to metaphor and to orientalism (Gardner emphasizes the “Eastern medicine” angle), and sweeping but inaccurate claims about how the body works – but it’s useful to present a decent, middle-of-the-road example of such bullshit now and then.
Otherwise, there seems to be little to distinguish Gardner from a long range of similar alternative medicine practitioners – she appears to be affiliated with the Mayway consortium of traditional Chinese medicine promoters along with a slew of other quacks – and the only reason we noticed her is that Gardner was involved in the marketing of the Yogi jacket a very silly contraption that at least manifested a parody-friendly strain of L.A. culture.
Diagnosis: Pseudoreligious woo-babble. Probably pretty harmless, but still.
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