Acupunture is not 5000 years old. It is 2000 years old:The History of Acupuncture in China – Healthy.net.
The theory of humors was originated with Hippocrates more than 2000 years ago and was accepted by occidental medicine until the 19th century. Even after Pasteur showed that most diseases were caused by germs, many physicians continued to treat several diseases with enemas and laxatives.
The fact that a theory lasts for tens of centuries means nothing! People can be fooled for a long time.
The strongest evidence that acupuncture corresponds to placebo effect has come from recent studies showing that “sham” acupuncture (using a device that only simulates needles piercing the skin) works as well as “real” acupuncture.
Examples cited for acupuncture and back pain, and here regarding study of acupuncture for polycystic ovary syndrome.
Placebo effect may be just the ticket for some people, and there are all kinds of placebos which may work for varying periods of time and to varying degrees, depending on the condition. Acupuncture increasingly seems to be no better and no worse as far as efficacy compared to the others.
Just don’t depend on it for treating serious ailments.
I can only add that none of the medical and not-quite-medical treatments i have been subjected to has been part of a controlled study.
Sure they have, you just weren’t part of the study. And, in fact, any results you had from those treatments are also not useful for determining the validity of those treatments - but we already have sufficient evidence for normal medical treatments, so the fact that your treatment doesn’t add further value as evidence isn’t a big deal, since none is needed. Evidence is needed to establish claims of new medical treatments (ie, those who have not previously undergone conclusive, replicable, appropriate studies) - whether those treatments are “alternative” or not (that is, they might simply be new “conventional” treatments) - and so when we’re looking to find out how effective a treatment that hasn’t yet been proven is, we need to make sure we examine it the right way. New drug trials, for instance, have to follow a very, very specific set of rules for establishing that they are safe and effective. The same applies to all other types of medicine for determining how effective they are, if not with the same concern for safety or side effects - as some things are inherently less dangerous than others (yoga compared to radiation therapy). There’s no compelling reason to change the standard for determining efficacy, though.
The real question isn’t does acupuncture work but what is the best form of treatment for disease? I say this because western medicine kills a great number of people. The number one cause of death in America is mistakes by physicians. But you will not find physicians error anywhere on the AMAs list of causes of death. In Israel the doctors went on strike and the death rate went down. Morticians claimed they could see the drop off in their business.
That being as it may one must work from a known to discover an unknown. That’s how a clinical trial works. Western doctors know that a sugar pill does nothing so it can be used in a trial. One compares the effect between a sugar pill and the drug one wants to test. But there is no known in acupuncture. So the concept of a clinical trial falls flat on it’s face with acupuncture. What they do instead is what is called “sham acupuncture.” This is using a needling formula that is not normally excepted as valid. Well how does one know if the sham is actually a new. formula. One doesn’t
But the biggest problem is in the literature itself. Having studied this stuff for a very long time it’s clear to me that what we have is everything from the old Chinese grandmas remedies to the emperors personal physician’s books all mashed together. It’s somewhat like finding your great grandmothers chicken soup recipe in JAMA. The reason for this is the political problems that faced china in the past century. It’s kind of hard to keep all your books straight while running for your life.
One of the big problems people have, no matter their level of education, is in understanding how acupuncture works. So at this point I will offer a conjecture.
There is a structure on the brain known as the neocortex. Mapped on this surface is the homunculus. A map of the body on the brain. This mapping was done on patients undergoing brain surgery. A small stimulation was applied to the neocortex and the patient would respond with what they felt. There are two things that should be noted about this. The first is if the doctor jabs the stimulator deeper into the brain they don’t get a different response. And the second is the patient can only reply to things they normally feel. The patient can’t say “Oh that’s my small intestine.” Because one doesn’t have a conscious feeling of the small intestine.
This actually give us a lot of information. Enough to have an idea how acupuncture could work. The fact that a deeper stimulation of the area of the neocortex doesn’t produce a different response shows that, as in all surfaces, it has a two dimensional nature. Such as a two dimensional vector space. Our bodies live in a three dimensional space. If one does a linear transformation from a three dimensional space onto a two dimensional space one gets a surface, just like the neocortex. And one is guaranteed to have two. or more, points in the three dimensional space share the same space in the two dimensional space. (This is how a needle in the leg can effect the stomach.) Also if one does a linear transformation of that two dimensional space back onto the three dimensional space they will get a line. In acupuncture the meridians are talked about as being different pathways but when you actually study you find they are all the same line with internal connections.
So there is a possible way of how acupuncture works. It’s a side effect of the mathematics of the central nervous system.
Acupuncture is at least five thousand years old. Ortzi the Iceman is about five thousand years old and he has evidence of a form of acupuncture. This actually points out something else I have come to believe. That is the Chinese didn’t invent/discover what is now called Chinese Medicine. I believe it was the Celts. And I believe that LaoTze wasn’t Chinese. He was a Celt. Resent archaeological evidence shows the remains of Celts in Xinjiang. The story is that when LaoTze was leaving China, because he thought the society was decadent, the gate keeper asked him to write a book to pass on his knowledge. That’s why he wrote the Tao Te Ching. He was going home to the Celts in XinJiang.
Can I prove any of this? No other then to say the mathematics I talked about can be found in any linear algebra book. And that the PDP research group, a group of very smart people that studied the brain to make a model to write artificial intelligence programs, made three models of brain function. All of them were based on linear algebra.
Wow! You’ve convinced me…to never get within 1000 feet of an acupuncturist’s office.
Deft change of subject there. But wrong. Check out the CDC’s list of top causes of death in the U.S. (Heart disease and cancer account for over 1.2 million deaths annually). Then look at the estimated number of deaths annually where iatrogenic (i.e. physician-related) causes are suspected. (“In the United States, an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year may be attributed in some part to iatrogenesis.”) There are some higher estimates for iatrogenic deaths, but they still don’t approach the major known causes like cancer and heart disease.
So your statement is incorrect (note also that despite your insinuation to the contrary, it is mainstream medicine itself from which we derive the above figures, including those relating to iatrogenic deaths). It is also deceptive to compare mainstream medicine which deals with many chronically and severely ill, frail, elderly patients to acupuncture, which takes on mostly (and thankfully) non-life threatening ailments in otherwise healthy people.
But of course you are not addressing “the real question” which is “Does acupuncture really work?” Even if “western medicine” was Evil Incarnate, that does not absolve acupuncture advocates/practitioners of the need to show that their woo works.
Glad to clear that up.
Wrong. Placebos have effects. Evidence-based therapies/drugs are supposed to have positive effects significantly exceeding those of placebos.
One gets the impression that one is confused. You can simulate putting needles into the skin using a clever device that does not allow either the practitioner or patient to realize what is sham and what is real (and acupuncture needles are so slender and cause so little pain, it is hard to tell when they have actually been inserted, as many (including me) can attest. When the results show that “sham” acupuncture works as well as “real” acupuncture (both giving placebo-type results) and that it doesn’t matter where you needle or sham-needle people (no fancy “meridians” needed) it demonstrates that the basis of acupuncture itself is a sham.
Uh…sure. That clarifies things enormously. All the relevant records were lost by Mao during the Long March. :dubious:
…dozes off…please wake me when evidence is supplied rather than conjecture…zzzzz…
Argument from antiquity. Even if it’s that old, there’s ancient Chinese medicine that says that consuming the preserved remains of your dead relatives cures illness. Should we follow that advice too? I mean, it’s real old advice.
Next?
Hey, acupuncture-works, what happened to the 5,000 (2000?) year old meridians? Why can’t they be seen on X-Rays or during dissection? Could it be that they are imaginary, and the theory behind acupuncture has, for 5,000 years, been wrong?
One would think that if acupuncture really works that the average life expectancy in China would have gone down substantially over the past 100 years (since the introduction of that evil Western Medicine stuff), with an every increasing downturn over the last few decades when compared over the history of the last 5000 years (you’d think a similar trend would be visible in The West as well, since we’ve gotten away from our 3 Humors and Eye of Newt system too). HAS such a trend happened? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the answer is ‘no’…that life expectancy in China is higher today with evil Western Medicine than it was at earlier times in history, but that’s just a WAG…acupuncture-works might have conclusive data showing that evil Western Medicine is killing more people in China today and that life expectancy has plummeted compared to those ancient days.
-XT
The problem is that placebos work best if you don’t realize they are placebos, but preventing the misuse of acupuncture for things least treatable with placebos means pointing it out. Quandry.
There are several ways to give alternatives for comparison, including different ways to do sham acupuncture. As mentioned, one means is to use a tool that masks which is the real needle and which is the sham needle, thus fooling even the practitioner.
I don’t follow how this is the case.
I think you misunderstood the comment. The comment was that sugar itself has no active effect on the conditions being tested. One wouldn’t use a sugar pill for a diabetes treatment placebo, for instance. The placebo comes from the administration of the pill and not from the stuff in the pill. His point was that with acupuncture, the “sham acupuncture” might have a means of effect beyond placebo. (Not that he’s right, but that was the point.)
But that’s a nitpick on an otherwise excellent post.
The point was that the meridians are not a physical structure through the body, but rather the effect of the mapping between the body and the homunculus. The meridians do not exist in meatspace, they exist as an artifact of the construction of the brain and how it models the body. No X-ray or autopsy will show the meridians, because they are not physical structures, they are a combination effect.
Seems to me the way to prove this requires mapping the homunculus and establishing all the points of it and how they correspond to the body. Triggering points in the brain and feeling sensations in multiple places in the body would be part of that confirmation process. But that is just me throwing a strong WAG and what would have to be developed as a methodological approach.
Not to nitpick your nitpick 
but what I was addressing chiefly was his stated belief that “a sugar pill does nothing” (untrue) and that “sham” acupuncture conversely does something and thus isn’t a valid placebo for comparison with “true” acupuncture. Pill placebos and “sham” acupuncture, neither of which have zero effects, both constitute a valid baseline for examining claims made for drugs and “true” acupuncture respectively.
I think his objections to “sham” techniques as means of evaluating acupuncture basically come down to altie special pleading, i.e. “your science can’t measure my woo.”
By the way, apologies for not addressing linear algebra and two-dimensional vector space in my prior posts. (when acupuncture-works invoked these concepts, it reminded me of a defender of homeopathy, Lionel Milgrom, a learned professorial sort who has published papers on how homeopathy accomplishes beneficial effects according to quantum theory. If you start from the faulty premise that woo with a ridiculous basis works, it’s tempting to delve into mathematical/physical hocus-pocus for an impressive-sounding explanation that will confound your critics. The resulting laughter does not help the cause. 
I love this. “How does one know that randomly jabbing needles into people isn’t just accidentally hitting undiscovered meridians, thereby rendering it precisely as effective as known treatments?”
This is basically trying to spin “accupuncture is as effective as randomly stabbing people” as a pro for randomly stabbing people.
In other words, meridians don’t exist, except in the mind of the acupuncturist.
With regards to the linear algebra stuff, I should note I have at least a vague reference - I sat through a class on it. Not that I’d want to do any linear algebra, or could if I tried.
From what I gather, the intent is a mapping problem. Anytime to try to represent a three dimensional object as a two dimensional surface, you run into a mapping problem of deciding what goes where. It is a similar problem to trying to map the Earth’s surface. The surface is a big curved thing, and we like to represent it with a rectangular flat image. So you run into all sorts of projections to try to represent the surface, and each projection has complications where they don’t do a great job. Think Mercator projection, and how it distorts the polar regions to look huge.
With the three dimensional reference, I’m coming up with an analogy. Say you have a tall building. Now imagine you want to represent the floorplan. Of course you can draw out the shape of the building and have that be the footprint, but how do you represent what is occuring on each of the floors? The standard approach is to create a separate floor plan for each floor, and then stack them next to each other on different pages or whatever. But an alternative projection would be to map them all on one floor plan, overlapping. Like you are on the roof looking down through the building, and see all of it projected onto one image. Of course it’s cluttered and confusing, because you can’t tell what is where, which floor is which.
I’m assuming the description of the linear algebra transformation is something like converting the 3-D building to a 2-D floorplan by means of the second projection type of compression, rather than the first method of separating the floors and setting them side by side. Thus if you mark a spot on the map, it will simultaneously be pointing to the coffee pot on the third floor and the front desk on the first floor and some guy’s desk on the 6th floor. And because it’s a projection, there’s no depth, no way to separate which point you mean.
To extend the analogy, when an acupuncturist pokes a pin in the left knee, it triggers the spot in the homunculous that represents the left knee. But that spot is also the projection for the right kidney and the left big toe. So wiggling the spot in the knee makes your toe stop hurting and your urine turn orange, or whatever.
That seems to be what acupuncture-works is suggesting. The mapping in the brain is the key to the connections.
The point is that meridians aren’t real structures, they are a conceptual tool to help the acupuncturist remember/understand the connections. The actual connections aren’t “meridians”, they’re whatever strangeness is occurring to map those elements to the same place in the homunculus. It’s just a tool, in the same way that, oh, the Periodic Table is a tool. Elements aren’t typically stacked in little bins in nature. But the table is a useful tool for categorizing and labeling, and it aids understanding. Or think of it like the “electron shells” model in chemistry, learning about all the levels 1s, 2s, 2d, etc (or whatever, I don’t remember). Except modern chemistry doesn’t actually propose there are physical orbital shells, but rather energy states. But the shell model is still taught, and still useful for categorizing the behavior of the energy states.
None of which is to say I believe any of this is going on. I’m merely trying to understand what he is saying, not defending its merits.
I see what you’re getting at. I guess that’s a different interpretation of the words. My interpretation was that it’s not the sugar but the taking of the pill, but I can see an alternate interpretation where “taking a sugar pill does nothing” was meant, which isn’t exactly true. The placebo effect is, by definition, something done by the taking of the sugar pill under the right circumstances. Similarly, “sham acupuncture” that involves actual poking could be triggering unmapped effects, and that would make it an invalid placebo, because it is having more effects that just the psychological ones caused by “getting treated”.
I think a better term might be “rationalization.”
If the believer is convinced that X exists, no amount of demonstration of the falsity of that claim will sway him. Instead, he tries to rationalize the two incompatible situations.
Are you familiar with religious apologists and redactors? A conversation might go like this:
“The Bible says X.”
“But we know that is not true, it is Y.”
“But when the Bible says X, it really means Y, so what is written is true.”
Similarly, the Biblical John is called a redactor. He noticed some discrepancies in earlier accounts, and rewrote his story to explain them, often (as best we can tell) making stuff up to plug the holes. Now when believers try to explain what Mathew or Mark says, they turn to John, because his version makes more sense and is more elaborate. That doesn’t make it more true.
Something like this seems to be going on with true believer acupuncturists. Meridians, originally postulated to be actual pathways thru the body, when shown to be nonexistent, are changed to be “just a concept,” instead of calling the entire theory into question as merely a fantasy.
Randomly stabbing people may seem like it would work in theory, but if you ask anyone who has taken an arrow to the knee, you’ll find out it’s not so fun.
The mapping analogy is flawed. A line segment, a surface and a volume all have the same number of points. The cardinality of all those sets is that of the real numbers.
Of course, if each of them has discrete points, the cardinality will be a natural number. But it is not impossible for a discrete surface to have the same number of points of a discrete volume.
According to this video, a test was done where pinching a rabbits bottom produced the same effects as sticking needles in it.
So the hypothesis is that any amount of pain in any given region maps to a meridian. Doesn’t seem disprovable to me.
No doubt. He’s looking for a different way to explain the stuff that he already believes but doesn’t have justification.
But what matters is the method of the mapping to assigning points. If the method of mapping creates overlaps, you’ll get the same points.
I don’t know how these linear transforms that he is talking about occur. I don’t know what he’s using as the functions to transform. That’s why I tried to find some sort of analogy to help conceptualize the issue.
In some sense, all analogies are flawed. Because if it actually matched the situation, it would be the situation, and you wouldn’t understand any better.
Sounds good to me. You pinch the rabbit’s butt over there to affect changes in me over here. 