Acupuncture? Placebo? Surely not!

[PhDwannabe]

Great Scott, it works! Oh yeah, and the fake stuff works pretty good too.

[Moontanman]

I underwent a couple years of intense acupuncture therapy and it was..... bullshit.. but the woman who did it was very good looking and always wore a short skirt and low cut blouse so it was fun but I seriously saw no real benefit from it....

[swansont]

It's mostly the part about Qi and meridians that makes acupuncture BS.

[PhDwannabe]

It's mostly the part about Qi and meridians that makes acupuncture BS.

 

Wholeheartedly agreed. Nothing wrong with touting all of the benefits of a big ol' sugar pill--because there's a lot of them. You've just got to label the bottle correctly.

[divagreen]

Is there an actual news article involved?

 

I wouldn't mind debating on the validity of acupuncture...I am on the fence about it myself...but then I don't dismiss the placebo effect, especially if it still attains a desired response.

[swansont]

Is there an actual news article involved?

 

I wouldn't mind debating on the validity of acupuncture...I am on the fence about it myself...but then I don't dismiss the placebo effect, especially if it still attains a desired response.

 

There's a link in the OP. "Sham" acupuncture works.

[divagreen]

There's a link in the OP. "Sham" acupuncture works.

 

Ooops...thank you Swansont.

 

I found this interesting in the article:

 

Only 15 percent of patients who received real acupuncture used extra pain medication, but 34 percent of patients in the sham group and 59 percent of patients in conventional therapy needed extra pain pills.

 

But then I also felt that the research was guided by this:

 

The study design may also have blurred the lines between real and fake acupuncture, muting the effects of the real thing. For instance, in traditional Chinese acupuncture, the needle insertion points are along specific areas called meridians, but the exact point of insertion is decided on a patient-by-patient basis, depending on the patient’s body and area of pain. In the study, however, a standard map was used so that the needle insertion point was the same for every patient. In addition, trained acupuncturists also were asked to administer the fake treatment and insert needles at specific points outside of traditional meridians. Although researchers sometimes stepped into treatment sessions to check on the location of the needles, it’s possible that some of the sham treatments were similar to real acupuncture.

 

Confirmation bias of due interpretation?

[CharonY]

More like unavoidable accuracy in the experimental setup. The individualized part makes it hard as it introduces all kinds of variables including e.g. the abilities of the respective acupuncturists.

[Marat]

You have to be careful not to dismiss a medical practise such as acupuncture just because the theory offered to explain it, in this case, Qi, is false. Prior to the Michaelson-Morley experiment, the waviform transmission of light used to be explained by the theory that it was carried on a subtle interplanetary fluid called the 'aether,' but the wave theory of light still has some merit.

 

Rather than look at acupuncture in terms of how it is now explained, consider how it first arose. Chinese warriors injured in battle by arrows often reported that their pre-existing illnesses seemed alleviated by their injuries, so from this the idea of deliberately manipulating these pressure points and finding which disease symptoms were correlated with them arose. It turns out that this basic concept, that you can manipulate nerves in one part of the body and produce an alleviation of disease symptoms elsewhere in the body corresponds to the independently developed, modern scientific theory of Head Zones. Physicians in Germany now inject procaine at strategic junctures of the nerves in parts of the body far away from the seat of the disease to be treated, and these procaine injections far away can reduce the disease symptoms.