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Don't Throw Out Acupuncture Just Yet!!!
Research is proving that Acupuncture is Curing Chronic Sinus Congestion.
See details at http://www.healthcmi.com
And according to the World Health Organization (WHO), acupuncture is a safe and effective treatment for the following conditions:
- Lungs - Some bronchial asthmas.
- Ears, Nose, and Throat - Toothaches, pain after tooth extraction, ear aches, sinus inflammation, nasal inflammation or dryness.
- Eyes - Central retina and conjunctiva inflammation, nearsightedness (in children), and some cataracts.
- Stomach and Intestines - Digestive tract problems, hiccups, inflammation of the stomach, chronic duodenal ulcers, inflammation of the colon, constipation, diarrhea, dysentery caused by certain bacteria.
- Nerves - Headaches, migraines, some facial paralyses and nerve pain, post-stroke weakness, nerve ending inflammation, and sciatica.
- Muscles - Tennis elbow, frozen shoulder, lower back pain, osteoarthritis, knee pain, sprains and strains.
- Miscellaneous - Incontinence (including bed wetting) and many gynecological problems.
Views: 386
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on
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Double-blinding is impossible in acupuncture research.
Oh, I think you could do it, as long as you were ok with not using trained acupuncturists to administer it.
Train a group of experimenters unfamiliar with the theory to give one protocol, train another group of experimenters to give another protocol, and don't let them know which is the treatment protocol and which is the control.
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Permalink Reply by Laura Allen on
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See there! I told you I wasn't qualified...that is an area I need to learn more in and it is on my long list of things to do. Ravensara's suggestion sounds plausible to me. Train people who don't have any knowledge of meridian theory to insert the needles and then allow them to place needles randomly instead of in the established acupuncture points.
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Permalink Reply by Christopher A. Moyer on
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But neither one of those groups would be experienced practitioners, so a non-result would introduce the problem that the result could be due to a lack of experience. You would also only be testing two competing meridian theories in that example, and if there is one thing we know pretty damn well about acupuncture, it's that the meridian theories have nothing to do with any clinical effect of acupuncture.
More to the point, for anyone not already familiar with the term, double-blinding is when neither the recipients of a medicine/therapy nor the providers of a medicine/therapy know who is getting the real thing and who is getting the placebo. This is considered ideal in research because it has the potential to control for placebo effects. When a therapy cannot be separated from the therapist's knowledge that they are performing it, you can't have true double-blinding. Notably, this is a potentially a problem in massage therapy research. It comes up in psychotherapy research as well.
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When a therapy cannot be separated from the therapist's knowledge that they are performing it, you can't have true double-blinding.
True. It depends what you mean by testing "acupuncture". If the question is "does stimulating a particular point have a particular effect?", my scenario could work, though. But you're right that if the therapist's knowledge is an essential component of the research question under study, you can't turn it off for double-blinding.
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Permalink Reply by Daniel Cohen on
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In TCM, including Acupuncture, the treatment is dependent on the diagnosis. It is not just placing needles. Is the problem a damp heat or excess energy or a depletion? A wrong diagnosis can actually increase the problem. There is no way to eliminate the skill from testing. Even if all receivers were screened for requiring the same treatment there could be errors as often as treatment progresses their are adjustments to the individual case. this is the difficult point of TCM treatments including Acupuncture and Acupressure.
Ravensara, how can the skill be removed if it is the skill necessary to successfully use the technique? In China Acupressure is a three year course. They are then beginners who will need years of experience to be sought after for cures.
Locally we have Acupuncturists on almost every corner. Some succeed and others close up or barely make a living. Others are busy to the point of having no private life. There are of course many factors, but one certainly is the diagnosis skill and how well they treat and how many conditions they are good at. Some are sought for pain management, some for diabetes, some incontinence...........
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Ravensara, how can the skill be removed if it is the skill necessary to successfully use the technique?
Ok, I guess you can't successfully do double-blinded RCTs of acupuncture in that case. So that means you'll never be able to disentangle any real acupuncture effects from placebo effects and attention effects.
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I doubt that inability will stop Acupuncturists from making a living or patients seeking them out to resolve a variety of conditions.
This discussion raises some key questions for research of massage and traditional medicine that are based on the skill of the practitioner. The effectiveness of massage has a lot to do with how you use your hand/arm/elbow/knee/etc to apply a move or hold to another person's body. Some hands just fit better with certain backs (just example). There are so many variables including the skill to use each that I wonder how blind testing can be applied definitively.
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"I doubt that inability will stop Acupuncturists from making a living or patients seeking them out to resolve a variety of conditions."
I'm sure that's true. But that's a long way away from the original post, which was about how acupuncture was supposedly "proven" to "cure" rhinitis and a lot of other conditions. All we've really established is that you can never know with certainty how much any perceived effects are due to acupuncture versus due to placebo versus due to attention from a fellow caring human being. That built-in uncertainty is a long way away from the certainty with which very specific claims are sold to clients--and that's my problem with the whole thing.
It also raises questions about how you can teach it effectively. A fundamental question of pedagogical fairness is whether the goals demanded of the student are communicable and measurable. When so much is subjective, the problem of how a student evaluates whether they got good training, or how a client evaluates whether they got a good practitioner is made that much more difficult."This discussion raises some key questions for research of massage and traditional medicine that are based on the skill of the practitioner. The effectiveness of massage has a lot to do with how you use your hand/arm/elbow/knee/etc to apply a move or hold to another person's body. Some hands just fit better with certain backs (just example). There are so many variables including the skill to use each that I wonder how blind testing can be applied definitively."
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Very true and this is why bodywork/massage remains an art.
Ravensara Travillian said:
It also raises questions about how you can teach it effectively. A fundamental question of pedagogical fairness is whether the goals demanded of the student are communicable and measurable. When so much is subjective, the problem of how a student evaluates whether they got good training, or how a client evaluates whether they got a good practitioner is made that much more difficult.
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Permalink Reply by Vlad on
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http://www.chiro.org/acupuncture/FULL/Clinical_Trials_of_Acupunctur...
They refer to blinding a wee bit in this - however, it's interesting how in the abstract it says practitioner blinding is "difficult but not impossible" but then where they write about it, you can see it's a bit weak. But the paper might be of interest to people as it explains sham treatments etc.
Also people will probably come across the term "double blind" in abstracts of trials that really aren't when you look at the methods in the main text. As soon as I see that, I regard it as a red light that the study is a pile of brown smelly stuff - but that's just me...everyone to their own.
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Interesting, Vlad; cheers! I'll have a look at it.
Vlad said:http://www.chiro.org/acupuncture/FULL/Clinical_Trials_of_Acupunctur...
They refer to blinding a wee bit in this - however, it's interesting how in the abstract it says practitioner blinding is "difficult but not impossible" but then where they write about it, you can see it's a bit weak. But the paper might be of interest to people as it explains sham treatments etc.
Also people will probably come across the term "double blind" in abstracts of trials that really aren't when you look at the methods in the main text. As soon as I see that, I regard it as a red light that the study is a pile of brown smelly stuff - but that's just me...everyone to their own.
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Very true and this is why bodywork/massage remains an art.
No doubt art is a big part of these practices - even the most scientifically-minded folks can agree with you on that. But they aren't purely art in the way of music, sculpture, and so on.
Pure arts (for lack of a better term) aren't progressive. There is no meaningful way to determine if The Beatles are better or worse than Bach. But therapeutic practices are progressive - we can meaningfully ask if one works better than another so long as we specify the conditions (just as you could meaningfully ask which is better - Beatles or Bach - for increasing math scores when played as background music for 10th graders completing the SAT).
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