Can we talk about acupuncture?

Great Debates
101

Musicat, I am familiar with everything you are saying, and it doesn’t really answer my questions. I mean, for me.

Acupuncture is not drug therapy, so I don’t see the relevance of pointing out that drug trials are scientific.

Acupuncture is more akin to surgery and physical therapy. What kind of proof do we have that those two treatments, or similar treatments work? I’m not saying they don’t work. I’m asking how do we prove that they work?

Additionally, given that many (most? I don’t know what percentage) doctors who think that acupuncture has been proven effective do not promote the theory of meridians as a mechanism, I don’t think the claim that acupuncture works is really extraordinary.

Medicine is not an exact science. If the aim is truly to help people, should we be skeptics or scoffers? Even Marcello Truzzi, who helped popularize this phrase, knew that it could be abused and does not always apply.

What kind of proof would be required to satisfy you that acupuncture works? Would it be possible to prove to you that acupuncture works? Can you ever imagine yourself saying that you think it’s an effective treatment?

102

[QUOTE=Haunted]
Acupuncture is not drug therapy, so I don’t see the relevance of pointing out that drug trials are scientific.
[/quote]
I have an easier time devising double-blind, repeatable tests for drugs than some other medical or pseudo-medical procedures, that’s why I brought that up.

IANADoctor or medical researcher, so I may not be qualified to answer that. But a quick googling turns up Vascular Surgery - double-blind randomised comparison of enoxaparin versus placebo, just as a random sample. Surgeons are not immune to this kind of test, it seems.

The original theory was intimately linked to the meridian map of the human body. Points were assigned or chosen for various reasons thought to relate to body functions as defined by meridians. However, modern science has shown absolutely no evidence of these points or meridians and that theory is hogwash.

So we are left with the possibility that the points perform the same function as thought due to a bogus theory, but absolutely no support for the reason they do. And, regardless of theory, western science has never noticed any of the reactions or correlations that acupuncture claims. How different this would be if, for example, western science had discovered that massage, surgery, or pins in the calf/ankle area of the right foot, points 35..40 on this chart had some effect on, as the chart says, “diseases of eye, ear, head, chest…”. Then we might say, “Hmmm, maybe there is a link between that anatomical region and the head area,” and research it further.

But, instead, western science, unencumbered by phobias against disection, found that nerve paths do not follow such fanciful layouts. The more we learn about the body, the less the meridan theory holds up. It seems to fall squarely in the camp of astrology, iridology, reflexology and many others.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we have to embrace anything that comes along without proof.

Sure. I can also imagine Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster exist, but the evidence is not improving for any of those, either.

One of the marks of pseudoscience is that evidence does not strengthen over time. In science, that which does not improve should be discarded as untenable.

As an example, the theory of plate tectonics was once regarded as weird. But evidence improved over time, and pointed more and more to the possiblity that continents really do move. They theory is now mainstream. Acupuncture cannot yet make this claim, no matter how much you may want to believe it.

OTOH, if you narrow down the claims for acupuncture; remove links to the meridian or yin-yang theories, eliminate any claims for disease cures, and use it merely as a super-massage treatment to make some people feel better, there might be something to it.

Just like placebos.

103

IANADoctor or medical researcher, so I may not be qualified to answer that. But a quick googling turns up Vascular Surgery - double-blind randomised comparison of enoxaparin versus placebo, just as a random sample. Surgeons are not immune to this kind of test, it seems.

Enoxaparin is a drug. Acupuncture is not a drug therapy. How do we prove that treatments like surgery work?

Nobody is asking you to. I am astounded that people keep asserting that there is no proof. Has anybody who says that actually read all the posts in this thread and the other thread and checked the links?

Why are you trying to denigrate the topic at hand by making it seem silly and not worthy of consideration? Why the tendency to discredit rather than discuss the evidence presented previously?

And one of the marks of pseudoskepticism is that it has a tendency to dismiss all evidence.

No offense to you, Musicat, but you did say you are not a doctor. So who is a better judge of how effective any medical treatment is? You, a non-doctor, or all the doctors, for example, from the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, the British Medical Association?

How do you explain that all these doctors believe that acupuncture is an effective treatment for some things? Are they all just dupes like me? Are all of them pseudoscientists? Can we believe anything they tell us?

104

We can easily use the scientific method to study acupuncture which is what my roommate and his professor are doing with surprising (to me) results. My roommate uses cats in his study because they can open up the brains of the cats and see what specific neuro pathways were affected by the acupuncture through the use of dyes. Also, with cats they can very carefully control the condition of the animals before and after. They buy cats that are raised just for labs so it is easy to control the health conditions the cats develop. Through these carefully controlled studies, they are able to determine that acupuncture can help with certain diseases or conditions.

Obviously humans are different than cats but they’ve done controlled studies with humans as well in the lab. I only know the cat stuff in detail because that’s the particular section my roommate was working on and I read some of his publications. If you have access to a listing of studies through your academic institution, I suggest looking up some of the studies that have been done on acupuncture. The science is still in infancy to say for sure what effects acupuncture has, but it looks like if it is done properly and scientifically then it can have some very positive effects.

You don’t have to believe in chi or whatever to accept acupuncture. I assume that the Chinese discovered that it worked and made up chi to explain why rather than making up chi and then making up acupuncture.

And finally… as I mentioned earlier, my roommate has strongly stressed to me that there is scientific acupuncture and folk acupuncture. Don’t dismiss the whole field because of a bad experience with a folk acupuncturist. If you are interested in acupuncture, find a person who is scientifically trained by an accredited University like UCI for example.

105

[QUOTE=Haunted]
Why are you trying to denigrate the topic at hand by making it seem silly and not worthy of consideration? Why the tendency to discredit rather than discuss the evidence presented previously?
[/quote]
I am not alone in considering acupuncture evidence not at the same level as mainstream medicine. That is why it is still considered complementary or alternative. That is why it is not taught alongside other medical skills in major US universities. That is why some insurance plans don’t pay for it, AFAIK.

And why are you so willing to believe in it? Everyone must make a decision on the quality of evidence to accept. Besides my own meager skills and education in this area, I put a considerable amount of trust in people like Wallace Sampson, a qualified, real doctor who is in charge of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, who says:

Here are some people who disagree with you, and their credentials far exceed mine. 13 studies with “adverse outcomes” are referenced at the bottom of the page, along with one that suggests that acupuncture might work for pain. Here’s one called “China, Chi, and Chicanery”.

The National Council on Health Fraud says this:

[quote]
[ol][li]Acupuncture is an unproven modality of treatment[]Its theory and practice are based on primitive and fanciful concepts of health and disease that bear no relationship to present scientific knowledge;[]Research during the past twenty years has failed to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective against any disease; []Perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter- irritation, operant conditioning, and other psychological mechanisms; []The use of acupuncture should be restricted to appropriate research settings; [*]Insurance companies should not be required by law to cover acupuncture treatment; and (more, snipped) [/ol][/li][/quote]

I have given you quotes/studies from reliable sources, and you have supplied some from seemingly reliable ones, as well. So we are left with having to make up our own minds until more evidence is accumulated. Myself, I don’t tend to gravitate towards the stuff that has tradionally been on the wrong side of the equation. YMMV.

I think we divide in two camps here. One, perhaps yours, is eager to grasp at any belief or any evidence that seems to prove that belief, and irrationality is not a consideration. The other, which I am a part of, says, “It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have a strong proof, and people can too easily be deceived. There are better alternatives around, with better proof and a greater likelihood of working.”

106

[QUOTE=Haunted]
I am astounded that people keep asserting that there is no proof. Has anybody who says that actually read all the posts in this thread and the other thread and checked the links?
[/quote]
OK, let’s check some of your links. From The Mayo Clinic (your link, not mine). That’s a pretty prestigious organization, and they don’t seem to be quite sure of anything:

What a great collection of weasel words! **May, might, preliminary. ** Only “symptoms” are affected, not the underlying disease or malady? Is this what you consider a strong endorsement?

The Mayo article says NIH researchers are "…studying at least three possible explanations…Opioid release…Spinal cord stimulation… Blood flow changes… " Note that they are not even considering yin, yang or meridians. Even the Mayo Clinic has discarded THAT theory.

Now let’s look at your link to WHO, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs134/en/ which has only this comment:

Hard to analyze that one, since no studies are referenced at all.

So let’s move on to your link to British Medical Assn. In that link, no studies are referenced, either, only a suggestion, “Guidelines and recommendations on CAM use for GPs, practitioners, and patients are urgently needed, and the Department of Health should select key CAM therapies, including acupuncture, for appraisal by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, for its third review programme in 2001-2002.” The rest of the page continues along those lines. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

No, it’s not very convincing.

107

[QUOTE=Haunted]
Musicat, Acupuncture is not drug therapy, so I don’t see the relevance of pointing out that drug trials are scientific.

Acupuncture is more akin to surgery and physical therapy. What kind of proof do we have that those two treatments, or similar treatments work? I’m not saying they don’t work. I’m asking how do we prove that they work?
[/QUOTE]
Non-drug therapies which cannot be studied double-blind may be investigated through randomized controlled unblinded studies. Blinding is extremely helpful as it removes a major source of bias, but the scientific basis for a trial is the random assignment of study participants to either a treatment group or to a control group. NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has sponsored forty-six clinical trials of acupuncture.

For my two cents worth of anecdote, I once participated in an yoga-based stretching class in which one of the actions was to concentrate chi between the palms of the hands, stretching it out and compressing it. While I had absolutely no belief in the existence of chi, I actually felt physical resistance as I pulled and pushed the empty air. From this I could conclude that chi is real, or that the placebo effect operates beneath the level of conscious thought and can influence sensory perception.

108

The main problem I have with people dismissing acupuncture because, “the theory doesn’t make sense,” is that antibiotics before the 1920s or so were in the same category as folk medicine. There had been one or two scientific studies of the action of molds in inhibiting bacterial growth, but basically everyone ignored them. It wasn’t until penicillin’s discovery that antibiotic research as we know it really started. Up until that time, doctors would have scoffed at mold being used as a treatment for infected wounds as “granny” medicine.

Similarly, Pasteur’s germ theories and immunization treatments were initially disputed, in part because his theory was radically different from the orthodoxy at the time. He even faced legal proceedings from practicing medicine without a license when he gave his first rabies vaccination; he wasn’t a medical doctor and acted illegally in vaccinating the boy. If he’d been delayed in giving the vaccination, it might have failed even though his theory was (as we now know) sound, and he probably would have been successfully prosecuted under the law. That would have tainted all of his research to that point. As it was, it was a minor miracle that Pasteur’s primitive vaccine actually worked.

Today, if someone even tried to do the exact same thing as Pasteur, he would be stopped from administering the treatment and branded as a dangerous quack, even if he had good reason to believe that his treatment was valid. Judging from the trend of this thread he would have had a very difficult time continuing to do any work, no matter how good his results, just because he wasn’t considered “credible” enough.

It hasn’t been that long since the stuff we use in hospitals all the time was considered either new, radical, and therefore untrustworthy, or old crap that was useless in a modern world. Old doesn’t necessarily mean useless. In fact, biopharmaceutical companies have been farming folk remedies for active compounds to use in drug research. They found that their hit rate when using plants used in traditional medicine as their starting point was hugely higher than random surveys. It’s been a while since my botany class, which had a whole section on plants as medicine, but I think I remember bioactive substances being found in about 1/3 to 1/2 of plants used in traditional medicine, and many of those were in fact effective on the condition being treated.

As to why there are no journals dedicated to acupuncture, I would say it’s mostly due to a couple of little incidents you may have heard of. During the Communist era, China tried to sever its ties with its past. Art, writing, and traditions were systematically destroyed in order to “modernize”. That acupuncture survived at all as a treatment in China is probably due to its utility. Western medicine is given all the attention, but acupuncture seems to be kept alive by both doctors and the surviving folk practitioners because it works for things that drugs and surgery don’t seem to help much.

Someone earlier in the thread said that hypnosis was okay but acupuncture is a crock. From what I’ve read, they have about the same incidence of effect. I don’t really understand why hypnosis is somehow acceptable but acupuncture isn’t. There’s no evidence of a theory that stands up to any testing behind hypnosis either. But sometimes it does work.

There is some evidence that acupuncture has an effect on certain problems and we don’t have much idea why it does. There should be some studies into what exactly is going on when there’s an effect. If it’s the placebo effect and nothing else then, as WhyNot said, we should be figuring out how the placebo effect works and how to exploit it, rather than dismissing it.

109

That wasn’t totally condescending. It started out very reasonably. Thank you for trying, Musicat.

110

Steel, you are correct in that many ideas and theories accepted today were once thought of as weird. The difference is, as I said in post #102, that evidence for real phenomena tends to strengthen over time, while for pseudoscience, it does not.

How much time is enough? There’s no hard and fast answer, but there are some reasonable limits. Hahnemann’s theories about homeopathy have had 200 years, and there is more evidence against it than for it; I’d say that’s enough time to make a decision. Plate tectonics became mainstream within about 20 years as evidence mounted that it was indeed correct. Galileo once claimed that Jupiter had 4 moons – pish-posh, you say? “Here – look thru the telescope. Not only can anyone see them, but I can predict where they will be next week.” Birds evolved from dinosaurs? Preposterous! But looky here – compare these bone structures and the chronology of fossils. It didn’t take faith or hope to believe it because the evidence strongly supported the theory.

So the fact that something sounds crazy doesn’t automatically make it correct – “They laughed at Galileo, sure, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown”. We need to apply critical thinking to any and all phenomena before accepting or rejecting it. Is the evidence good evidence? Can tests be repeated? Are the results definitive and statistically valid? Do all researchers get the same results? Is the good data far above the noise? Are there any factors not accounted for that might influence the results? Does any researcher have an ax to grind or a product to sell? Are the results in line with the prediction?

Acupuncture has been around for 5000 years, supposedly, and the only good evidence that has piled up is: [ol][]The underlying theory is bunk,[]Claims for disease cures are bunk, but[*]It might have some use for pain alleviation for a limited set of circumstances, and maybe not more than placebos even then.[/ol]I’d say 5000 years is long enough to make a preliminary judgement, but I’m open to new studies if they’re done right. Bring 'em on.

111

[QUOTE=Haunted]
Testy,
I’m so sorry about what happened to your wife. I can understand why you feel the way you do about alternative medicine.

I also wanted to let you know that I was really impressed by your honesty when you replied to my comment about you preferring to accept conclusions that confirm your beliefs. So I wanted to let you know, that even as I wrote that comment, I was thinking, “I’ve done the same thing.” At times, I have focused on facts or conclusions that confirm my beliefs or opinions while giving less consideration to ones that don’t. I think, probably, most of us have. But, you took my comment with a lot of grace and actually thought about what I said and I think that’s really cool, especially considering what you have been through recently. It’s downright inspiring. Thank you for setting a good example for me.
[/QUOTE]

Haunted

Thank you for your kind words. It does present me with a bit of a problem in that I’m having a tough time working myself into a frenzy when you persist in being so reasonable and decent. S

Back on the topic of accepting ideas that confirm your initial impressions. As you say, most people do this. I’ve been thinking that, as regards health care, this may be a very good thing. Any new, untried, unproven treatments should have an uphill battle convincing people. The problem, of course, is where someone draws the line between proven/unproven.

An odd thing I’ve noticed about those cites you posted. You and I are reading the exact same words but are reaching entirely different conclusions from them. You read them and say that acupuncture is proven effective and can help in some cases of some disorders. I read the exact same thing and it comes across (to me) as “reaching”. The use of “may” and “possibly” and other CYA terms makes it sound less definite than I would like. As we’ve discussed, people tend to see things that confirm their beliefs and I suspect this is a very good example of it.
The rest of my post is based on my perception of those cites, ie, acupuncture is effective at barely more than a placebo level and the researchers are having to try very hard to find acupuncture effective on an objective basis.

If I’m going to use a treatment, I want something like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&list_uids=12462288&cmd=Retrieve&indexed=google

The reference is just the results of a study on antibiotic resistance but comes across (to me) as very credible because they include the numbers they developed and the methods they used to develop them. I can review the results and make up my own mind. More importantly, I can give you my reasons for doing so if you challenge me. With acupuncture, I don’t feel that I have nearly this level of certainty.

Reputable Western researchers have decided that the results that count are those that come from blinded tests and that can be replicated. That attitude has served us well and I would bet that many of us on the board have been saved from a life threatening illness by science done to this standard. If we abandon the requirement for blinding and replicable results, (like those in the NIH study referenced above) where does that leave us? Whether it is due to the difficulty of designing a blinded test or other reasons, how can we simply say that a technique or philosophy that has proven itself so many times is simply “not applicable” when it comes to acupuncture?
The other problem of course, is what about other “alternative” treatments? They too have their proponents and Google provides numerous references to cures done by faith healing, crystals, homeopathy, and other treatments where there is no sort of doubt that they are a sham. Please note that I’m not accusing you of believing in any of the above or requiring you to defend them. My point is that if we relax our standards of evidence in the case of acupuncture then where does it stop?

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days and have come up with Testy’s theory of acupuncture. S Could it be that simply damaging the patient using needles, knives, or even a hammer simply causes the body to release opioids? No need for “chi,” meridians that don’t correspond to anything, or other mystical ideas. I’ve noticed things during sparring matches that might indicate this. The first time I get hit, it hurts like hell. Thereafter, not so much even though the punch or kick might have been more powerful. It might be opioids or it might be the king of hormones, adrenalin. Either way, the effect seems real.
As others have pointed out, opioid release may be the underlying reason for such success as acupuncture has had. If so, this turns it into a useful physiological response instead of mystic medicine from the East. If acupuncture could rid itself of its perceived ties to mysticism and other “alternative” remedies it might enjoy more acceptance and might also be more readily tested. Who knows, it might even stop being “alternative.”

Regards and all the best and sorry for the rambling.

Testy

112

Physician checking in … many of us mainstream Western docs do believe that acupuncture can work some for some things, even if we think that the theoretical framework is a pile of hoo-ha.

The problem of course is as pointed out. The difficulty in having a good control group. But some real positive results with real blinded controls have been done. For example here

And here

And others if you care to look. Of course there are also results in which sham needling did as well as the traditional arm.

Dramatic effects? No. A replacement for Western medicines? No. A useful adjunct in some cases with little potential for harm and some potential for real benefit? Yes. And probably best at the things that we in Wesern medicine often do poorly at, like chronic pain syndromes where some people quickly ramp up to options that can carry significant risks of harm. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to spend years to learn the technique as an adjunct to my pediatric practice. Nor do I routinely send patients to an acupuncturist. But there have been a few that I have sent and I have no objection when my wife goes to one for a neck spasm or for headaches.

I am a devout skeptic but what do I care if the theoretical base is horse hockey if it works? Some of what I learned in med school was horse hockey too. (For example, theophylline, then a staple of asthma care, was thought to work because it was a phosphodiesterase inhibitor and caused a cascade effect … which it does … in the lab. Turns out that it doesn’t do that significantly in the body and that the reason it worked in asthma was actually more due to central and diaphragmatic effects. So our theory base was wrong. But that didn’t mean that it didn’t work, just that we didn’t understand why it worked.) And anyway, there are some very good Western explanations for it, gating, etc. The bigger point was that chi and energy flow didn’t turn out to be good models of how things worked in a predictive way. They were stories made up to explain what was already observed but never were used to make predictions and new discoveries. That has been the boon of the Western approach: it creates testable models and makes predictions of other things that might work as well. In that way it has led to great advances that traditional Chinese medicine never made.

113

[QUOTE=DSeid]

The problem of course is as pointed out. The difficulty in having a good control group. But some real positive results with real blinded controls have been done. For example And others if you care to look. Of course there are also results in which sham needling did as well as the traditional arm..
[/QUOTE]

I read those links. Look, acupuncture involves sticking a needle in someone, you can’t have a real double-blind. From what I know, “sham” acupuncture still involves a real needle, stuck into a real place, *but *just not in a “qi meridian” or whatever. However, we know now that the theory behind Eastern acupuncture is 100% bunk. The needles- even when placed in the wrong areas- do seem to do somehing real, however. But is that acupuncture?

I mean we now know that for certain ailments, leeches are the very best modern treatment. And the Medieval theory of the 4 Humours used leeches.

“Methods of treatment like blood letting, emetics and purges were aimed at expelling a harmful surplus of a humour.”
But that does not mean anyone thinks that the “Four Humours” and bloodletting is valid medicine, even though we have now found a valid use for leeches.

Now here is the theory behind acupuncture (Wiki)"Chinese medical theory holds that acupuncture works by normalizing the free flow of qi (a difficult-to-translate concept that pervades Chinese philosophy and is commonly translated as “vital energy”), blood and body fluids (jin ye) throughout the body. Pain or illnesses are treated by attempting to remedy local or systemic accumulations or deficiencies. Pain is considered to indicate blockage or stagnation of the flow of qi, blood and/or fluids, and an axiom of the medical literature of acupuncture is “no pain, no blockage; no blockage, no pain”. The delicate balance between qi and blood is of primary concern in Chinese medical theory, hence the axiom blood is the mother of qi, and qi is the commander of blood. Both qi and blood work together to move (qi) and to nourish (blood) the body fluids.

Acupuncture* as a theory* is psuedoscience bunk. Yes, we have found that the needles seem to have valid use in modern medicine. But the Theory is bunk.

Thus “acupuncture” is as valid as “the Four Humours” even though there seems to be a real use for a tiny part of each in modern scientific medicine.

114

Testy: good post. :slight_smile:

Dseid: Without reading the studies you refer to, what pops out at me right away is the sample size. One used 30 subjects, the other, 27, and these are further divided into two groups (controls and treated). Just as a mathematical exercise, imagine what happens to the percentages if just one subject is changed from one result to the other.[sup]*[/sup] Random fluctuations in results cause large fluctuations in the reported percentages. The results look impressive, but they are not meaningful; it’s much ado about nothing.

You can analyse the heck out the numbers, but if your data is thin, your conclusions carry little weight. It’s a poor and unreliable way to do science.

[sup]*[/sup]Example: if the sample size is 13, 6 subjects who “feel better” is a percentage of 46. But if 7 feel better, that’s 54%. Wow! 8 percentage points more! Sounds significant, yes? But that represents only one person and maybe he felt better because it was his birthday.

115

DrDeth but the placing needles just anywhere didn’t work as well as placing them in the “right” spots. You can have a decent control blinding the patient and the evaluater. The efficacy of traditional acupuncture over random needling is a falsifiable claim and stands up … for some things. And we totally agree: the theory is pseudoscience but the efficacy seems to be, in some limited way, real. The potential harm is miniscule and the cost is reasonable. So I see it as having a place, especially for those for whom any positive effect may help reduce exposure to other interventions with more potential for harm. And I think that this view is fairly common among Western doctors, especially among those I know who deal with chronic pain patients.

Musicat that’s what p-values are for. The first one, for example, had a p-value of 0.01. That means the chance of this occurring because one or two people randomly had a good or bad day is less than one out of one hundred which is considered low enough for the findings to be significant. The second, okay, no reported p-value in the abstract, only a claim that some measures reached significance … sounds a bit weak.

116

Thanks, Testy and DSeid for those interesting posts!

I have been thinking about all this, too. I think everybody has raised valid points and I’m not going to argue with anybody about them because I respect the right of all of us to draw our own conclusions on any topic.

I thought it might be an interesting addition to the topic if I related a little bit more of my own experience. Of course, I could be wrong and it may not be interesting at all. Oh, well.

As I said, I had two Morton’s neuromas (and a ganglionic cyst) in my foot. All confirmed with various pieces of modern Western medical equipment… MRI and all that stuff, conclusively diagnosed by my podiatrist. (This all started about 5 years ago.) I did what I now know is the standard protocol, starting with a change in footwear and activity. Still severe pain that was getting worse with time. So we tried a corticosteroid injection and my foot swelled up like a balloon. Couldn’t do that again. Still had the pain and now the only standard treatment left was surgery. Contraindicated in my case… too risky at the time in the opinion of my podiatrist. That’s when he suggested I try acupuncture. As I said, it worked for me. From what I’ve read since then, the pain from a neuroma does not just go away by itself. Some type of intervention is required, so I conclude that it was the acupunture treatments that stopped the pain.

Prior to this, I had never given any thought to acupuncture. Didn’t have any opinion of it one way or the other. I tried it because I was in *a lot of * pain and a medical professional suggested it.

I am grateful to that podiatrist. In my opinion, he did a great job. He did not try to fit me into some model of evidence-based medicine. He didn’t say, “Well, Haunted, it’s surgery or nothing. That’s all we got for you.” No, he looked at me, my condition, my needs, what was best for me, and he gave me another option some people may not have suggested. I’m grateful that he cared more about my health than what some other people might think about him suggesting “quackery.”

So I had great success with acupuncure that first time and have pursued it as a treatment since, also with great success. Naturally, when somebody says it doesn’t work, I’m kind of “Wha?” Because of my own experiences, I have concluded that it does work. To be honest, evidence either supporting or not supporting that conclusion means little to me except as points in some stupid argument that I now realize was silly.

Quick side note - recently I went to see my acupuncturist and realized that the person she was with before me had left by the back door. She told me that that patient, a man, always parked around back so that nobody would see his truck and know he was visiting an acupuncturist. Funny, but also sad that this man has to hide something that he obviously considers helpful to his well being for fear of being ridiculed.

117

[QUOTE=Haunted]

So I had great success with acupuncure that first time and have pursued it as a treatment since, also with great success. Naturally, when somebody says it doesn’t work, I’m kind of “Wha?” Because of my own experiences, I have concluded that it does work. To be honest, evidence either supporting or not supporting that conclusion means little to me except as points in some stupid argument that I now realize was silly.
[/quote]
Your sample size was…wait for it…ONE. You think that is enough to prove that treatment X actually was the cause of your improvement?

For any condition, whether you treat it or not, there are three possible outcomes:[ul][li]You get better,[]You get worse, or[]Nothing changes.[/ul] The goal of proper tests is to connect only one factor of the treatment with the outcome. It’s the ony way to learn what is the cause and what is the effect. Do you realize how many factors are involved in your personal test? [/li][quote=Dseid]
Musicat that’s what p-values are for. The first one, for example, had a p-value of 0.01. That means the chance of this occurring because one or two people randomly had a good or bad day is less than one out of one hundred which is considered low enough for the findings to be significant. The second, okay, no reported p-value in the abstract, only a claim that some measures reached significance … sounds a bit weak.
[/quote]
Please explain why you say “the chance of this occurring…is less than one out of a hundred” in this case. You have 13 people who are probably asked, “How do you feel today?” and have to come up with a very subjective answer, one affected by many, many more factors (what did you have for breakfast, for example) than just a one-time presence/absence of a needle in a specific location. Yet you feel confident that all subjects’ reporting is highly accurate and repeatable? Nonsense.

With regards to sham acupuncture and other tests, if we have one group poked with needles at “meridian” locations and another at “sham” locations, this would be a test of the meridian concept, not necessarily acupunture. But if one group is poked with needles at any location and the other, no needles, that would be a test of “puncture” vs. “non-puncture”. Whether “puncture” is the same as acupuncture would depend on your definition of the word.

If course, to be a good test, care would have to be made to avoid either poker or pokee knowing what test was being done. Difficult (but not impossible) – how do you simulate needles without using needles?

118

Musicat, this was not an experiment. It is my life. This is an experience that I had and the conclusions I drew. If you’re suggesting that I substitute my own judgment with yours, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I was in a lot of pain, I did something about it, and now I am not in a lot of pain. I’m happy about that and don’t really care what you think.

Take your vigilante skepticsm elsewhere. It doesn’t work on me. Yeah, I guess I’m woowoo. BFD.

119

Don’t let anybody tell you acupuncture is painless. It can be painful, as I can attest from my experience. I had it done by a Chinese acupuncturist in LA, and he inserted needles in my wrists and ankles that were very painful. Some may not experience pain, but I did.

120

Musiccat, that study was the blood pressure study and the experimental group had significantly lower bp.

How do they work out statistical confidence for pain? Well, here is a study that reports one way. You use rating scales and pain med use.

Cochrane is often felt to be the best source in the medical literature for critical evidence based reviews. They looked at acupuncture for the treatment of nausea and vomiting and looked at

Is that big enough for you? It should not be dismissed just because its theory base is a fantasy. Neither should it be accepted just because it is ancient and Eastern. Being evidence based means accepting what the evidence shows you even if it does not appear to make sense.