Leon Hammer and John Shen don’t think it is bullshit. According to Hammer, who is the founder of the Shen-Hammer system, aka Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis (CCPD), the pulse can in fact “give us the most precise picture of even the most subtle and complex deviation from this standard of health” because “[t]he pulse record is an instant picture of the current status of a person’s voyage from birth to death”. For a practitioner who approach the issue “with dedication, quiet patience and consistency, becoming attuned to pulse qualities is an ongoing meditation, a training ground for awakening and awareness into total focus and concentration. As such, pulse diagnosis is an opportunity for practitioners to obtain the ultimate satisfaction of being one with their patients, one with themselves, one with the diagnostic process, and perhaps one with the universal forces that are expressed through the pulse.” In other words, it’s utter bullshit, with a sprinkling of helpless deepity. That said, Hammer also appeals to experiments set ut by the Chinese government in the 1950s in which “many well known masters of Chinese pulse diagnosis were asked to examine a patient”. Not surprisingly, “[t[heir findings varied widely”, and pulse diagnosis was accordingly judged to be an unreliable diagnostic tool – Hammer disagrees, however: the variations just shows that “each different pulse system is correct, providing not contradictory information, but different information.” And if your reaction is something in the vicinity of “wait …”, Hammer is ready to admit that it “is difficult to contemplate and absorb”. Indeed. You are just close-minded. Anything goes.
Hammer is also the creator of Contemporary Oriental Medicine (COM), which includes “over 100 unique concepts not included in TCM”, including “birth traumas and Heart shock, toxicity, Liver qi and yang deficiency, the separation of yin and yang as precursors to significant and debilitating illnesses, etc.” In other words, Hammer takes TCM and adds whatever woo he fancies to comprise what he views as “the true embodiment of tradition, seamlessly blended with modern insight and wisdom”. None of it has anything to do with reality, of course. Hammer is very clear that he really believes that it works, but doesn’t seem to recognize the need to actually test it.
In fact, there is a test of his pulse diagnosis. Sort of. Hammer’s own disciple Karen Bilton submitted “Investigating the reliability of Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis as a diagnostic tool in Oriental medicine” as partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Technology in Sydney. In the study, Bilton carefully tested inter-tester reliability among Hammer’s own acolytes and found decent levels of agreement of intra-rater comparisons and (somewhat less) of inter-rater comparisons for certain conditions. Of course, she admits that “reliability … was the exclusive interest of the study, and not validity.” In other words, she found some agreement among students of Hammer’s when it came to setting diagnosis, and carefully avoided judging whether any of those diagnoses had anything whatsoever to do with reality! It is, in other words, an absolutely glorious example of tooth fairy science, and utterly laughable as such. That Bilton was apparently not immediately forcibly removed from the University of Sydney’s premises is a disgrace to that institution.
Diagnosis: Batshit stupidity with delusions of grandeur. And this one, too, seems to have achieved some popularity, at least to the extent that the nonsense has drifted into and mixed with the general fog of fads and quackery that is the modern wellness movement.
Note: Hammer seems to have passed away, but since we’d already written this entry we decided to publish it anyways. His work presumably lives on.
Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine
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