I agree that the findings, as reported, seem surprising. However, some healthy caution is advisable. When it comes to scientific research, it is rarely possible for lay people to gain much understanding from the research itself, because we simply lack the relevant background of specialised knowledge or technical comprehension. It is even less easy to gain much understanding from the way such research is reported in the popular media. There are simply so many unhelpful factors that get in the way: selective quotation, selective focus, erroneous reportage, trimming and editing for production purposes, the journalists’s own lack of competence or comprehension… and so on.
If we take the CNN report at face value, the study seems to have been well-conducted and on a scale that should give significant results. However, even here we have to be cautious. The chosen focus was ‘lower back pain’ and subjective assessment of therapeutic relief. Subjective assessment isn’t much of a guide to anything - according to subjective assessment, I possess the ability to communicate with the dead (as I demonstrated on an edition of ‘Prime Time’ a few years back).
Of course, in the absence of any other factors, we should expect that subjective assessment is as flawed with respect to the real / sham acupuncture treatments as it is with respect to the ‘conventional’ treatments, but this may not necessarily be the case. It is often remarked that modern, Western medicine, while it has its great achievements and glory moments, is flawed because it lacks personal touch and personal warmth; that (as typically administered) it is too detached, clinical and lacking in what some refer to as the ‘holistic’ approach. In simple terms, it doesn’t do anything to engender ‘warm ‘n’ fuzzy’ feelings, when this is precisely what a lot of patients need more than they need anything else. This point is made as often by supporters of ‘western’ medicine as by its detractors. The so-called complementary therapies have their faults and their dangers, and are inherently guilty of spreading ignorance that can be costly. However, one point generally in their favour is that they involve a warmer sense of personal care and contact, and this can be a very significant factor in how people feel afterwards.
In other words, setting to one side the points already made about the way technical matters get reported in the popular media, it may be the case that conventional medicine confers is effective in a given percentage of trials, but any amount of ‘warm and fuzzy’ personal attention, allied to the ‘ritual magic’ aspect I referred to before, will produce even better results (whether sham or not).
We might find this surprising, but then again perhaps we shouldn’t. You can show me the finest, most pwerful drug yet devised for dealing with, say, general depression, and I’ll bet everything I own that it doesn’t make the patient feel as good as they do after a good, heart to heart chat with a good, caring friend followed by a reassuring hug. Perhaps the problem is that they don’t bother to do clinical trials pertaining to ‘a good, heart to heart chat with a good, caring friend followed by a reassuring hug’. Who knows? Maybe they should.