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Acupuncture Q&A

I did the math in from the other article, and I couldn't get 2.8%.

Acupuncture:
8.95-2.22=6.73
Sham acupuncture:
8.95-1.98=6.97

So from there I tried....


(6.97-6.73)/6.97 = .035
6.73/6.97 = .97

(6.97-6.73)/8.92 = .027
(6.97-6.73)/8.95 = .027

Those numbers all come from the first four week period. Note that the sham treatments leveled off in effectiveness (as would be expected from placebo effects) but that the acupuncture group continued to show improvement.

At the end of the study there was a 10% difference between acupuncture and sham acupuncture.

In any case, these percentages aren't really meaningful. It's a pain scale, not a numerical measurement.

Do you really need me to tell you that hydrocodone is addictive, causes users to develop tolerances, and that overdoses can lead to heart failure?:confused:
 
From post #16: "Taking one example, the WOMAC pain score was approximately 8.95 at baseline in the three groups. At week 4, it improved by 2.22 in the true acupuncture group, by 1.98 in the sham acupuncture group and by 0.84 in the education group."

2.22 minus 1.98 = .24 8.95 guzzunta .24 = .026, 0r 2.6%

Now please compare it to REAL medicine...like aspirin? Ibuprophen? Vicodin?

Christine, do you know what pain is? My MD's give me Vicodin in bottles of 100. Am I addicted? No. How do I know? My half full bottle is 2 1/2 years old. Some addiction, eh? Would you like to start a "Wanna see my scars?" thread? (Fowlsound would win that one)
 
Trust me, I'm not going to participate in a "wanna see my scars" thread. I can win any medical gross out contest, but it gets tiresome after a while.

I don't want to sound judgemental, but if you have only taken 50 of your Vicodin in 2.5 years you are either in a lot of pain or you are not in the sort of pain I associate with severe, chronic arthritis. I watched my grandmother slowly die of Vicodin addiction. She was taking 200mg a day for a long time, and it destroyed her mind and body.
 
Hmm.. i think i'm happy we have no vicodin in denmark(or that i don't know about it). For a period of 6 months i took atleast 8 normal pain killers a day, 12 wasn't out of the ordinary, and i think i did 16 once.

Just normal stock painkillers like aspirin(though not aspirin, differnet brand, same strength).

Oh, and no, i wasn't addicted.

The day i took 16, i was still lying on the floor crying in pain :( was on the verge of taking morphine.
 
ChristineR said:
Trust me, I'm not going to participate in a "wanna see my scars" thread. I can win any medical gross out contest, but it gets tiresome after a while.

I don't want to sound judgemental, but if you have only taken 50 of your Vicodin in 2.5 years you are either in a lot of pain or you are not in the sort of pain I associate with severe, chronic arthritis. I watched my grandmother slowly die of Vicodin addiction. She was taking 200mg a day for a long time, and it destroyed her mind and body.
Click to expand...

My bottle is labeled 500mg, each. I doubt granny was addicted at 200mg/day. I would thinnk your granny also had some other age related ilness? Parkinsons? Dementia?

Meanwhile, back at the opening post.....

You still have not compared Acupunctuation to real medicne, only to placebo. Did granny try acupoking?
 
My grandmother had heart disease, but she did not have dementia. I can assure you she was addicted and was extremely messed up mentally by the Vicodin. There's nothing quite like waking up in the middle of the night to find a little old lady stealing the Vicodin. I'm probably confused about the 200 mcg. I think it may have been 5mg x 4. She also weighed about 87 pounds by this time.

She wouldn't have tried Acupuncture for a million dollars. She'd consider that Satanism. She also didn't drink or wear makeup, and she ended up stealing Vicodin out of the medicine cabinet and hiding it so she could take extra doses.

I never said acupuncture is superior to real medicine. I said it worked. It is not mysticism, or sympathetic magic, or placebo. It has real, measurable, testable, physiological results, and even if it's not very good results, it has the advantage of not being an addictive opiate.
 
vbloke asked for killer question.

Here's one.
Q: Ask ... Can you use Acupunture to kill me?

A: Logically any medical science or remedies is a double edged-sword. It can heal and it can kill. (eg. Drug Overdose, poisoning, toxicity at high volume. If it cannot kill, it is possibly not potent enough.

I'm keen to put acupuncture to the ultimate test.

If the acupuncturist say "yes", then tie him down to a Challenge to kill you.

Most Acupuncture detractor would boast that acupuncture has no effect.
But as I understand, acupuncture is not just the needles, they uses TCM theory and Chi theory to decide which place to place the needle.

Asking these question allows the brave debunker to walk-his-talk. It is like drink "poison" which is actually placebo, or to drink "poisonous"-homeopathic solution.

If skeptics are so sure it doesn't work, then prove it!

If how ever the acupuncturist say "no", then you may mock them for the lack of potency of accupuncture. It'll really really put acupucture in the class of homeopathy. Just plain safe water, no danger.

But of course, if you really do it, get good people to ensure they don't cheat. Even if they did, I'm quite sure it'll go down in history.
 
Jyera said:
Here's one.
Q: Ask ... Can you use Acupunture to kill me?
Click to expand...
Well, there have been fatalities due to acupuncture. Pneumothorax for one, fatal infections introduced by the needles for another (easy to happen if the acupuncturist doesn't believe that bacteria cause disease). So yes, you could easily kill someone with acupuncture. Inducing a tension pneumothorax would be my preferred method.

Jyera, we already remarked on how easy it is to say "acupuncture works" if you simply redefine acupuncture.

Rolfe.
 
Mojo said:
I thought that one of the reasons that acupuncturists were able to get away with making up all the stuff about meridians and the flow of qi etc. was that there was a taboo on dissection of human corpses, so what was actually inside the human body was a matter of pure conjecture. They had no way of knowing that there wasn't actually any structure corresponding to the phenomena they claimed.

Since there was presumably no taboo on cutting up non-human animals (how else could they eat them) this wouldn't arise in veterinary medicine.
Click to expand...
I read that historically the belief in qi flow arrises from the disection of hanged criminals on the sly.
Because the blood had settled (or maybe been drained out), they found hollow tubes running through the body so they assumed that the breath was being pumped through the body.
Qi is chinese for breath(with strong overtones of vitality) and this explains why the meridians correspond to the circulatory system so well.

Unfortunately I can't remember where I read this, so it might not be true. Is anyone in a position to confirm it or poke holes in it?
 
Although the lecture I attended as about veterinary acupuncture (and how the Chinese didn't do that at all, until it was introduced from the west in the 1960s), some mention was made of human acupuncture. I'm sure I recall the lecturer commenting that the "meridians" were originally blood vessels.

Rolfe.

PS. Of course the word "artery" comes from the early Greek or Roman belief that these vessels transported air around the body, because the specimens they were able to examine were all soldiers who had died from exsanguination, and the "arteries" were observed to contain air.
 
Jyera said:
Q: Ask ... Can you use Acupunture to kill me?

A: Logically any medical science or remedies is a double edged-sword. It can heal and it can kill. (eg. Drug Overdose, poisoning, toxicity at high volume. If it cannot kill, it is possibly not potent enough.
Click to expand...

Not quite. Massage has all sorts of therapeutic uses and yet lacks that easy road to lethality.

Aspirin can make you ill, but you'd have to be suicidal to make it kill you (the LD50 for a child is 104 mg/kg- a Bayer tab is 325 mg, so 10 pills has a 50% chance of killing a child- but I'd wager the choking risk is far higher). I suspect the LD50 for adult humans would be higher, but the MSDS I saw had no data on that.


On the other hand, anything you can think of can be used to harm someone.
 
I really don't think this is a redefinition of acupuncture. Sticking needles in people is my definition of acupuncture. All the stuff about Chi is not part of my definition.
 
ChristineR said:
I really don't think this is a redefinition of acupuncture. Sticking needles in people is my definition of acupuncture. All the stuff about Chi is not part of my definition.
Click to expand...
Does it bother you that you might be better off going to a cop with a tazer for treatment, than a 'classically' trained accupunturist?
 
Jekyll said:
Does it bother you that you might be better off going to a cop with a tazer for treatment, than a 'classically' trained accupunturist?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't go to a classically trained acupuncturist. Doesn't mean that no one ever should go to a modern acupuncturist. I'm pretty sure a cop with a tazer could not reduce pain levels.;)

TCM doesn't bother me any more that all the other quack treatments out there. If someone can get some good out of scientific acupuncture, I'm all for it.
 
Loon said:
Not quite. Massage has all sorts of therapeutic uses and yet lacks that easy road to lethality.

Aspirin can make you ill, but you'd have to be suicidal to make it kill you (the LD50 for a child is 104 mg/kg- a Bayer tab is 325 mg, so 10 pills has a 50% chance of killing a child- but I'd wager the choking risk is far higher). I suspect the LD50 for adult humans would be higher, but the MSDS I saw had no data on that.


On the other hand, anything you can think of can be used to harm someone.
Click to expand...
I could very easily kill you by sticking an acupuncture needle in you and twiddling it a bit. To my definition of twiddling, that is! Like I said, creating a tension pneumothorax would be the easiest way. It has in fact been done accidentally by poorly-trained acupuncturists, so it should be perfectly simple to do it on purpose.

Which has no bearing at all on whether or not any sort of needle-twiddling can be therapeutic. Lots of things are simply poisonous, with no medical benefit.

Rolfe.
 
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