talkmagic.co.uk

Just found this http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4493011.stm

Everybody else says ithat it is placebo.

My mum suffers from athiritis and swears by acupuncture, I always thought it was b*ll*cks.

Her knees click all the time, whereas after treatment they didn't click (although it wore off over time)

So is there actually more to it than the placebo effect?

It’s not a placebo.
One of the body's natural processes, is to mask pain, and to heal It's self.

It goes way back to when a minor injury would put you in danger of being eaten by a wolf, or some other hungry creature..

By sticking a needle in, and aggravating specific nerve endings, you can stimulate that masking process to mask off the pain in a chosen area.
To put it another way..
The human nervous system is at its most basic level, a giant circuit board.
Interrupt the electricity here... and the bulb over there goes off.

Indeed it's not placebo. Homeopathy though... grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (Maybe I've been reading/ watching too much of James Randi #cough# legend #cough#)

It's interesting that the British Acupuncture Council are happy to accept the results when they are vaguely positve but whenever the results are negative they explain them away by saying that you can't create a proper control group with acupuncture. I guess in this case they suddenly could...

Nowt but a load of pricks!!!

That's acupuncture

A J Irving wrote:It's interesting that the British Acupuncture Council are happy to accept the results when they are vaguely positve but whenever the results are negative they explain them away by saying that you can't create a proper control group with acupuncture. I guess in this case they suddenly could...

Why not create a control group by simply placing the needles away from the proper points, or am I missing something?

Tomo wrote:

A J Irving wrote:It's interesting that the British Acupuncture Council are happy to accept the results when they are vaguely positve but whenever the results are negative they explain them away by saying that you can't create a proper control group with acupuncture. I guess in this case they suddenly could...

Why not create a control group by simply placing the needles away from the proper points, or am I missing something?

There have always been plenty of suggestions for ways to have a control group, just whenever the results come out as negative or inconclusive then the BAC dismiss them by saying that the control methodology was wrong and therefore the tests and their results are invalid.

I'm not saying that the BAC are trying to weasel out of any results that they don't like, it's just odd that now a positive study has appeared, that haven't raised the same objections. Maybe I'm just cynical.


Edit: re-Reading what I wrote, what I meant to say was that they can never agree to an appropriate mthid of blinding the trials! Slightly different.

Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo effect. The placebo effect *is* an effect, though.

Control groups do use sham acupuncture using stage-dagger needles, or by placing the needles at random points. Random needle placement creates the same level of effect as traditional placement, which should cut down on acupuncture course lengths. Essentially, the more rigmarole and ceremonty involved, the stronger the placebo effect, something I think the community refer to as the "old witch doctor" bit.

I personally think "chi" and the like is tosh, but I do wonder if there's a neurological effect at play. I've been spiked with an acupuncture needle (did it as a module in medicine - let me make it clear that this was a "special interest" module, along with Medical History, Spanish for Medics and that sort of thing, not a necessary part of the medical curriculum that we are taught as fact!) and it gives a dull, tingling ache.

This is surely no different from anything else that uses the gate theory of pain, i.e. stimulate the somatosensory receptors surrounding a painful area, inhibit some of the nociceptor signals, like rubbing the toe you just stubbed. But no doubt the effect it seems to have on non-pain conditions are due to placebo effect.

Working from memory, and without the benefit of a safety net, I think the issue with the nerve gate theory in acupuncture is that the relief is local, minor, and exists only when the needle is actually in, so the nerve gate response (which I think is still in dispute to some extent any way) isn't enough to explain pretty much any claims made for acupuncture.

Tomo wrote:Why not create a control group by simply placing the needles away from the proper points, or am I missing something?

I think the problem is then that the test wouldn't be double blind (as the person knows that they're in the wrong place)

Mr_Grue wrote:Working from memory, and without the benefit of a safety net, I think the issue with the nerve gate theory in acupuncture is that the relief is local, minor, and exists only when the needle is actually in, so the nerve gate response (which I think is still in dispute to some extent any way) isn't enough to explain pretty much any claims made for acupuncture.

Fair do's! I certainly have no stock in it!

I know personal anecdotes are poor evidence but....I've suffered from dodgy knees for years, I tried physio and the like and thought I would give acupuncture a go as I'd seen on some programme that there actually was some evidence of benefit for knee problems. What I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence is that my knee pain was lessened during the treatment and for about half an hour after that then....back to (ab)normal.

Curiously, I also found that losing two stone dramatically reduced the pain - I'm thinking there's a link....

Craig.

kolm wrote:

Tomo wrote:Why not create a control group by simply placing the needles away from the proper points, or am I missing something?

I think the problem is then that the test wouldn't be double blind (as the person knows that they're in the wrong place)

Maybe you could train people to stick needles in but tell them to put them in the wrong places.

Or explain to the acupuncturists that they are testing traditional placement against a "new" placement system. This isn't ideal, but if you provide anecdotal evidence for the new system to the right acpuncturist, then their ought to be little difference in how they administer the needles.