<G> Unlike the western "humours" and such. Oil of Elders. Many other bad
ideas that have long since been rejected. But leeches are back.

Just like all science, ideas were tried and some survived after
empirical examination. Others fell by the wayside. The sheer fact of
there being so many people in China implies that some of their medical
ideas would seem to have merit. And if you look at India next door also
with medical traditions different than western medicine and combine the
total of the two populations, they represent something around 1/3 of all
living people. Either people need less medicine than is generally
thought or there are some good ideas out there not in favored currency
in the west.

Have you ever read the speech that Douglas Adams gave wherein he
discussed feng shui? <http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/>
"Is there an Artificial God?"
Douglas Adams' speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge U.K.
September 1998

It's a brilliant read about some central issues to the human experience.
About 2/3 of the way through, he says:

"This is very speculative; I’m really going out on a limb here, because
it’s something I know nothing about whatsoever, so think of this more as
a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. I want to
talk about Feng Shui, which is something I know very little about, but
there’s been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out
how a building should be designed, built, situated, decorated and so on.
Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by
dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it.
So, if a dragon wouldn’t be happy in the house, you have to put a red
fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter
nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense—there
aren’t any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is
nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can
tell you how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me if you
disregard for a moment the explanation that’s actually offered for it,
it may be there is something interesting going on that goes like this:
we all know from buildings that we’ve lived in, worked in, been in or
stayed in, that some are more comfortable, more pleasant and more
agreeable to live in than others. We haven’t had a real way of
quantifying this, but in this century we’ve had an awful lot of
architects who think they know how to do it, so we’ve had the horrible
idea of the house as a machine for living in, we’ve had Mies van der Roe
and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are
supposed to form some theory or other. It’s all carefully engineered,
but nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in.
An awful lot of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and
work with an architect (and I’ve been through that stressful time, as
I’m sure a lot of people have) then when you are trying to figure out
how a room should work you’re trying to integrate all kinds of things
about lighting, about angles, about how people move and how people
live—and an awful lot of other things you don’t know about that get left
out. You don’t know what importance to attach to one thing or another;
you’re trying to, very consciously, figure out something when you
haven’t really got much of a clue, but there’s this theory and that
theory, this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural
practice; you don’t really know what to make of them. Compare that to
somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and
say, ‘It’s going at 17 degrees’; start to work it out on paper, do some
calculus, etc. and about a week after the ball’s whizzed past you, you
may have figured out where it’s going to be and how to catch it. On the
other hand, you can simply put your hand out and let the ball drop into
it, because we have all kinds of faculties built into us, just below the
conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex integrations of all
kinds of complex phenomena which therefore enables us to say, ‘Oh look,
there’s a ball coming; catch it!’

"What I’m suggesting is that Feng Shui and an awful lot of other things
are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we
know how to do, but don’t necessarily know what we do, we just do them.
Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should
be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to
work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural
principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing
architectural fad, just ask yourself, ‘how would a dragon live here?’ We
are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature
may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different
variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic
creatures live. We’ve never seen a dragon but we’ve all got an idea of
what a dragon is like, so we can say, ‘Well if a dragon went through
here, he’d get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because
he couldn’t see that and he’d wave his tail and knock that vase over’.
You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy here and lo and
behold! you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic
creatures, such as ourselves, to live in."

Pastorio

It is a diet, because it is what you eat.

I question whether it is really an approach, because important parts of a
healthy lifestyle, like excercise and not doing stupid things like smoking
and driving without seatbelts are not inculded.

jeff