Does Acupuncture really work (Article

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I came upon this Straight Dope article from 2000 about whether acupunture really works:

The article concludes that there is NO evidence it works. Since it is so old, i am not sure this is the last word from Cecil, but i couldn’t find anything further on the subject so i here are a few things i know about it. (Some of these contradict Cecil’s assertions in the article)

  1. Acupuncture use in china predates recorded history, making it at least 5,000 (yes thousand) years old. Modern western medicine dates to the 19th century.

  2. Acupuncture IS widely used in China and Korea (as well as in the US), and there is a lot of crossover (people who are trained in both eastern and western medicine).

  3. I have been to an AMA certified Doctor in NYC (she was Dr. of Osteopathy) and received acupuncture.

  4. I have been to an Acupuncturist (Dr. of Oriental Medicine) in California for Back Pain and diagnosed with a (Probable) case of strep and advised to see an M.D. immediately to be prescribed antibiotics. Dr was correct, and i am very glad i went.

  5. In California a Dr. of Oriental Medicine can be your primary care giver for insurance purposes. Practicing in CA requires a 4 year graduate degree (just like western medical school) and passing Board Exams.

Cecil states “At best acupuncture can be said to alleviate rather than eliminate pain” but i have direct experience contradicting this.
My visit to the NYC Dr was for what turned out to be a bad case of swimmers ear (caused by a fungus inside the ear.) The pain was so bad i woke up in the middle of the night and went to the ER. ER couldn’t get me in at all, so i suffered for the night and went to a Dr first thing in the morning. My ear hurt way to much for her to stick a scope in my ear and look at it, so she popped a couple of needles into my hand. The effect was immediate and certain (stopped the intense pain in my ear so Dr could look inside). After she diagnosed me, she proscribed pain killers (tolectin i think) and an antifungal ear drop. This mix of eastern and western medicine benefitted me more that either one would have alone.

Doubtless i will get responses saying i imagined the effect, or was hypnotized or otherwise bamboozled into thinking the intense acute pain was gone. I have several sarcastic responses to that notion, but mainly i have a VERY hard time believing this effect is not provable and repeatable.

2

OOps, accidentally submitted that.
to continue:

I think the author is stuck on a lack of good empirical studies on the subject.

So: To finally resolve this, here is what i propose: If someone or group of people will bet me the price of a medical study (total of around $100,000 i think), I am willing to bet that I can prove beyond the standard deviation at least one of the theraputic uses of acupuncture over a placebo. All of you who are SO sure it is voodoo - put your money where your mouth is.

3

Who would pay you to do a study when you are so sure of the answer already?
Others that believe have proven it works, others that do not have proven it doesn’t.
What are your qualifications to do a medical double blind study? Have you researced other studies that have already been done?

4

ericwnyc, those stories you so glibly tell from personal experience have absolutely, positively no scientific validity whatsoever. They are subject to a dozen fallacies, most notably post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which says that if B follows A, one didn’t necessarily cause the other.

And it doesn’t matter how many of them you can make up or find. Anecdotes are not evidence, in any quantity.

Studies that have been done properly have either come up negative, inconclusive, or suggest the placebo effect is the operative factor here.

And because something started 5000 years ago is no reason to hold it in high regard. Just the opposite. What did the ancients know about disease, anatomy, chemistry and physics? Nada. That’s why life was nasty, brutish and short. I certainly don’t want to return to that ignorant and dangerous time, and I doubt if you do, either.

5

Hi Lanzy,
Ha! No, I don’t have any qualifications to do a proper study. Also as you say i am biased by my own experience. Those are good points.
To be honest I wasn’t expecting people to actually volunteer to bet. I just hate the idea that this comparison between TCM and voodoo is just sitting out there unchallenged.
E

6

To follow on from the fallacious reasoning post…

Appeal to tradition.

Appeal to popularity.

Appeal to authority.

That’s impressive. Here’s the article.

Also, the whole interview is fantastic, but the last part is pertinent to the discussion.

7

Musicat,
I know anecdotes are not evidence that it works.
Nor are 13 year old articles from the British Journal of Medicine noting (Chinese studies are erroneous) evidence that it doesn’t work.

8

Once again people. My original post is NOT meant to be taken as any sort of scientific evidence. I carefully wrote an experience I had, as the one thing that i KNOW happened.

I would like to see a study that shows that the pain killing effect that I experienced is or is not proveable. If anyone knows of one, please post some info.

9

That’s the thing though: there is no evidence of disproof. We only hold that things that have no mechanism for disproof are not worth considering. Those that have evidence with a criteria for disproof are subjected to critical scrutiny. If their evidence does not hold under that scrutiny, the evidence is dismissed.

10

You guys are TOUGH, i finally had to do some googling. Here are links to 3 scientific studies that appear to indicate that acupuncture has a measurable effect in various types of acute pain relief. I’ll look around for more and post when I have time.
E

this one’s a pdf: Redirect Notice

11

And that’s about all you’re going to find is apparent effects in pain relief.

Why? Because unlike many other medical conditions and diseases, pain is difficult to measure and quite subjective. You can’t put it in a petri dish and count colonies, you have to take the patient’s word for it.

This means that it is more important than ever to control for biases and effects that have nothing to do with the treatment being tested, but can cause apparent results. Double blind and plecebo-controlled trials are critical. Large numbers of subjects and replicated studies are also important, and what we are looking for is a signficant improvement in a specific condition, specified beforehand. A 10% improvement wouldn’t be good enough for a heart drug, but it appears to be the best we can get in many pain studies.

“Appear to indicate…” is not enough to overturn science and rewrite anatomy.

If acupuncture can ever pass the same rigorous tests as medicine, it would cease to be alternative, and be medicine. It hasn’t, and it isn’t.

12

After researching this, it turns out that acupuncture’s use as an analgesic(pain reliever) was established through clinical trials:
These are studies between 2003 and 2005. Please have a look:

Heres a military study that says they found a 23% drop in reported pain levels (it says p < 0.0005 which i think means very accurate): Auricular acupuncture in the treatment of acute pain syndromes: A pilot study - PubMed

World Health Org medical study that is more effusive: http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js4926e/4.html

Heres a study by an anesthesiologist about whatever he uses it for: http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/content/106/2/611.full

Sorry i didn’t think to do this research to start with - Thank you all for your “rigorous criticism” :slight_smile:

E

PS: reality changed before i had to accept it

13

Here’s the thing: you’re way too dismissive of placebo effect. Placebo effect isn’t “imaginary” or “hypnosis” (hypnosis, for the record, being an effect with substantially more credibility and evidence than accupuncture). It’s a powerful, real effect.

My hunch is that accupuncture is effective precisely because it’s a good placebo. It’s complicated, odd, mysterious, and old. It’s a ritual, and an odd one. And the little bit of pain it causes is a good way to help somebody shift their focus.

I’d wager that if somebody had walked up on the street and stuck you with a needle in the exact same spot the doctor had, your earache wouldn’t have gone away.

14

Sigh…

By searching the Internet to respond on this post, I found that the analgesic effect WAS PROVEN through clinical trials, repeatedly, over the past 8 years. People may have learned 15 years ago in college that there was no/dubious proof, but studies I have cited (since 2003) prove scientifically that acupuncture works. I would like to point out that it is very hard to convince people who have already made up their minds, and won’t even follow a link to convincing studies by U.S. military hospitals and the W.H.O.

Refusal to look is not science. Many of you in one sentence extol the virtues of scientific method, and in the next state your preconception that it is impossible and could not possibly work - AND this is in the face of something already proven (see the links)! I can’t imagine what you sound like with something that is TRULY experimental and unproven, which could be tomorrows greatest scientific advance.

Regarding the theories behind it all not making sense: Quantum mechanics also has no theoretic basis that makes sense, but it has predictive power and can be demonstrated experimentally, and without it, we wouldn’t have computers at ALL much less the Internet. Imagine a person had rejected quantum mechanics in 1910 and therefore would never use a computer. Imagine how it would sound to you if that person told you (who are using a computer right now) that computers and electronics couldn’t possibly work, they didn’t need to look further into it, because the theory was ludicrous, and any appearance to the contrary was due to biased studies, bad science, and the placebo effect.

That is what you refusers sound like to people who have experienced acupunture. Your knee-jerk rejection and refusal to look further or examine recent studies is NOT science, any more than the flat-earth society is geology.

Before i give up on all of you, let me throw a couple more things out there:

  1. Nowadays Veterinarians use acupuncture effectively on animals (demonstrating placebo effect on cows?)

  2. Some conditions (like Bells Palsy) have no western treatment at all, and are VERY EFFECTIVELY treated with acupuncture. I hope if you or a family member ever have a condition where acupuncture is strongly indicated, your preconceptions do not prevent you from getting the medicine that would help you.

Also to anyone interested in Acupuncure’s role in modern medicine, see the documentary “9000 Needles” 9000 Needles - Wikipedia

Thx All,
E

15

Acupuncture isn’t being dismissed based on what we learned in college 15 years ago. It’s being dismissed based on the totality of research on the subject. Yes, you can find numerous studies showing an analgesic effect. It’s almost the only area you might expect an effect at all. Poking needles into people should have an effect on their perception of pain. What you will also find, if you’re not just looking for reports to bolster a particular view on acupuncture is: that the higher the quality of the study, the lower the effect (in general); that sham acupuncture (retracting needles, needling in the “wrong” places etc.) works as well as real acupuncture; and that there are also numerous studies that show no effect.

16

ericwync, I’m not going to address your “studies,” which have not been accepted, nor replicated, by the scientific community. Instead, I’m going to suggest that until you propose a likely mechanism by which acupuncture works, you’re going to have a difficult time convincing anyone in the scientific establishment.

Why? Because the idea behind acupuncture is a fanciful idea, born when dissection was not respectable in Chinese society, that there are meridians that exist in the human body.

It was a great idea. It made sense, especially if you had never seen the insides of a human organism. It was wonderful, it explained everything, it proposed a solution to sickness and everything that went wrong with our bodies.

Unfortunately, it was never, not 50%, not 20%, but zero%, substantiated when medical science overcame its squeamishness for cutting, and found nothing, not the slightest evidence, for the theory of meridians.

Most scientists would, learning from experience, discard the meridian theory and propose another. Most scientists did, and the germ theory, among others, took their place and proved to be marvelously effective, resulting in the eradication of smallpox and (nearly) polio, not to mention a hundred other maladies that are now a distant memory.

But the proponents of acupuncture have not, but still cling tenaciously to the thoroughly discredited concept of meridians. Sure, some studies have suggested that acupuncture works, but the placebo effect rears its ugly head, and science is not convinced, but revolted by the ignorance.

So, what is the mechanism by which you propose acupuncture has any beneficial effect on the human body? If I dissect a corpse, will I see, instead of the anatomy that is taught in medical school, a meridian?

17

Reading this, I can’t help but be convinced that ericnyc knew exactly the response he’d get, had this more or less prepared, and came back to post this entirely to have a “last word,” creating the impression of a thread in which he asked “experts,” got rejected, then posted a dismissive rebuttal to show how “out of touch” the “experts” are.

I just can’t figure out why.

18

No.

Honestly, these questions just get easier and easier. Don’t know why Cecil still has a job. :wink:
ETA: Hi, Cece! Just joking, right? We’re still cool?

19

I don’t believe in meridians or qi or whatever, but I know that for the six months I went to acupuncture my allergies went almost to zero.
Was it placebo? I don’t know.

20

I’m glad your allergies went away. Maybe it worked, maybe it was a placebo - since (I’m assuming) the work wasn’t done as part of a controlled research experiment, the results aren’t helpful from the point of view of establishing the general efficacy of acupuncture.