I ruined my friend's woo

osmosis

Critical Thinker
osmosis
Joined
May 1, 2006
Messages
445
LOL! A friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in quite a while told me she'd been having some problems with her wrist, and had undergone acupuncture sessions to relieve the pain and stiffness. (paid for by medical insurance, of course!)

Naturally, I told her that acupuncture is woo. She went to her next scheduled session, and whatever placebo effect she experienced has mysteriously vanished, and now the acupuncture doesn't work for her.

She half-pretended to be angry at me, I really ruined that for her.

Interestingly enough, she was talking to the practitioner about it, and this woman admitted she was skeptical and didn't think acupuncture could actually do anything beneficial. However, some people seem to think it works and they're willing to pay $40 for her to stick some pins in them and twist them. One lady apparently shows up once a week or so with the sniffles, and only acupuncture can do the trick.

The human mind is a bizarre thing.
 
fMRI evidence for acupuncture?

There is some evidence that acupuncture is valid. See especially the paper of Z.H. Cho et al. [PNAS 95: 2670-2673 (1998)], which is available online.

The paper is entitled "New findings of the correlation between acupoints and corresponding brain cortices using functional MRI". Briefly, the authors found that when acupoints were stimulated, the corresponding (according to acupuncture) part of the brain was activated.
 
TKOne said:
There is some evidence that acupuncture is valid. See especially the paper of Z.H. Cho et al. [PNAS 95: 2670-2673 (1998)], which is available online.

The paper is entitled "New findings of the correlation between acupoints and corresponding brain cortices using functional MRI". Briefly, the authors found that when acupoints were stimulated, the corresponding (according to acupuncture) part of the brain was activated.
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Has anything come of this discovery in the last 9 years?
 
TKOne said:
There is some evidence that acupuncture is valid. See especially the paper of Z.H. Cho et al. [PNAS 95: 2670-2673 (1998)], which is available online.

The paper is entitled "New findings of the correlation between acupoints and corresponding brain cortices using functional MRI". Briefly, the authors found that when acupoints were stimulated, the corresponding (according to acupuncture) part of the brain was activated.
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Maybe I'm nuts but I would think that when foreign objects get stuck in your body your brain WOULD notice. ;)
 
I read an article not too long ago of a study that found that the acupucnture placebo effect was better than the pill placebo effect. They compared placebo pills with sticking trick needles in (like those trick knives where the blade goes inside the handle and doesn't penetrate the skin). The trick needles were significantly better at reducing pain than the fake pills.

I have a feeling that, generally, the more dramatic the useless cure is, the more effective it is.
 
Since many health insurance plans these days are paying for acupuncture I would like to propose a new form of woo that should also allow me to get treatment for a small co-payment. It could even be argued to be derivative of acupuncture.

Tattoo Therapy.

C'mon... $5 for a tattoo instead of $500? Who could resist.
 
Evidence for acupuncture

Zep, I have not followed all the literature. I just cited Cho et al. because it was the first paper to present solid scientific evidence. Cho et al. has about 200 citations on GoogleScholar. A quick look there shows that several other research groups independently obtained similar results (and have published such in the peer-reviewed literature).

NormalDude, your reply makes no sense; you should have read my comment before replying. Or go crazy and read the abstract, which I include below.

A preliminary study of the correlation between acupuncture points (acupoints) for the treatment of eye disorders suggested by ancient Oriental literature and the corresponding brain localization for vision described by Western medicine was performed by using functional MRI (fMRI). The vision-related acupoint (VA1) is located in the lateral aspect of the foot, and when acupuncture stimulation is performed there, activation of occipital lobes is seen by fMRI. Stimulation of the eye by directly using light results in similar activation in the occipital lobes by fMRI. The experiment was conducted by using conventional checkerboard 8-Hz light-flash stimulation of the eye and observation of the time-course data. This was followed by stimulation of the VA1 by using the same time-course paradigm as visual light stimulation. Results obtained with 12 volunteers yielded very clean data and very close correlations between visual and acupuncture stimulation. We have also stimulated nonacupoints 2 to 5 cm away from the vision-related acupoints on the foot as a control, and activation in the occipital lobes was not observed. The results obtained demonstrate the correlation between activation of specific areas of brain cortices and corresponding acupoint stimulation predicted by ancient acupuncture literature.​
 
TKOne said:
Zep, I have not followed all the literature. I just cited Cho et al. because it was the first paper to present solid scientific evidence. Cho et al. has about 200 citations on GoogleScholar. A quick look there shows that several other research groups independently obtained similar results (and have published such in the peer-reviewed literature).

NormalDude, your reply makes no sense; you should have read my comment before replying. Or go crazy and read the abstract, which I include below.

A preliminary study of the correlation between acupuncture points (acupoints) for the treatment of eye disorders suggested by ancient Oriental literature and the corresponding brain localization for vision described by Western medicine was performed by using functional MRI (fMRI). The vision-related acupoint (VA1) is located in the lateral aspect of the foot, and when acupuncture stimulation is performed there, activation of occipital lobes is seen by fMRI. Stimulation of the eye by directly using light results in similar activation in the occipital lobes by fMRI. The experiment was conducted by using conventional checkerboard 8-Hz light-flash stimulation of the eye and observation of the time-course data. This was followed by stimulation of the VA1 by using the same time-course paradigm as visual light stimulation. Results obtained with 12 volunteers yielded very clean data and very close correlations between visual and acupuncture stimulation. We have also stimulated nonacupoints 2 to 5 cm away from the vision-related acupoints on the foot as a control, and activation in the occipital lobes was not observed. The results obtained demonstrate the correlation between activation of specific areas of brain cortices and corresponding acupoint stimulation predicted by ancient acupuncture literature.​
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Emphasis added. I rest my case.

JonWhite's linked study, however, was 500,000 participants. You can guess which one I will take more seriously. Just for the record, I'm not totally aganst acupuncture, it just needs to be brought up to the 21st century.
 
study size, etc.

Normal Dude, those are different types of studies. The study with 500000 has numerous confounding variables; hence it is only indicative. The study with 12 would seem to have no such confounding, and had a clean, highly-significant correlation; hence it is near proof. Moreover, the latter study has been independently replicated several times.
 
TKOne said:
Normal Dude, those are different types of studies. The study with 500000 has numerous confounding variables; hence it is only indicative. The study with 12 would seem to have no such confounding, and had a clean, highly-significant correlation; hence it is near proof. Moreover, the latter study has been independently replicated several times.
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Yet it would be hardly a big enough sample to represent anything significant.

This is akin to testing a prescription drug on only twelve people and calling it effective.
 
Could it be that acupunture somehow stimulates some parts of the brain, but this stimulation has no effect on the alleged sickness?.
That would reconcile both studies.
 
Miss Anthrope said:
Yet it would be hardly a big enough sample to represent anything significant.

This is akin to testing a prescription drug on only twelve people and calling it effective.
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I have been advised by a statistician that 4 subjects per group is the minimum number required to obtain statistical significance.
 
Normal Dude said:
Just for the record, I'm not totally aganst acupuncture, it just needs to be brought up to the 21st century.
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But can acupuncture be justified in the 21st century when there are cheaper and more convenient methods of pain relief available which are equally as effective?

Also from the Ernst article in the Guardian linked to by Jon White:
[From leaked preliminary results] …adjunctive acupuncture turned out to be better than standard care but sham acupuncture yields the same benefit as "real" acupuncture.

This is perplexing because it could be interpreted in two dramatically different ways. The optimist (or acupuncturist) would say that the results demonstrate the effectiveness of acupuncture - adding it to standard care improves the outcome compared to standard care alone. Hence acupuncture must be a good thing. On the other hand, the pessimist (or scientist) would insist that these results prove that acupuncture is merely a placebo therapy with no "real" effects of its own. It doesn't matter where we stick the acupuncture needle, the patient improves in any case, and this can only be due to a placebo response. Hence acupuncture has no "real" value.
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From Bob Park in 2004 (the same year as the Ernst article):
ACUPUNCTURE: RESEARCHER FINDS THE HAYSTACK IS FULL OF NEEDLES

Huge breakthrough? A University of Maryland researcher, who has been touting acupuncture for the last 17 years, now reports it may actually work - sort of. Here's the picture: a few thousand years before it was known that blood circulates or germs cause disease, doctors who had never dissected a frog, claimed that yin and yang could be balanced by inserting needles into the right points, among the hundreds of points strung along 12 meridians. They called it "acupuncture," from the Latin acus, needle and punctus, prick. Which is odd, because they were Chinese. But if they figured out acupuncture, they must have been smart enough to learn Latin. Scientists today can't even find the meridians. A Maryland study of 570 elderly patients who suffer from arthritis of the knee, found that 6 months of acupuncture modestly reduced pain and improved agility. Six months? Why not take an aspirin? Scientists suggest the needles stimulate release of endorphins. Jalapeno peppers do the same thing. So it wouldn't matter where you stick the needles would it? Then who needs an acupuncturist?

http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN04/wn122304.html
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Wallace Sampson on acupuncture last year:
"It is nonspecific," Sampson says. "If it has the effect of, say, releasing endorphins through the application of needles, well, many things release endorphins -- a walk in the woods, a 5-mile run, a pinch on the butt."

-snip-

"I look at it this way: what if acupuncture didn't exist?" he says. "Would medicine or society be any worse off? If no one knew about it, nothing would change. You would still have ways to apply counter-irritation, through massage or rubbing."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/31/NSGDOIM5RJ1.DTL&type=health
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I chose my words badly, by saying I wasn't totally against it and bringing it up to the 21st century, I meant it should have to pass the same levels of scrutiny that other present day treatment options must pass; to date, I don't think it has held up to that standard.
 
Lucifuge Rofocale said:
Could it be that acupunture somehow stimulates some parts of the brain, but this stimulation has no effect on the alleged sickness?.
That would reconcile both studies.
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I agree, this line of reasoning makes sense.

Is there any "official" stance on what accupuncture is designed to treat or cure?
 
Monza said:
Is there any "official" stance on what accupuncture is designed to treat or cure?
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According to the ‘Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine’ (2nd Edition, 2006), which provides an analysis of the most up-to-date research available on CAM therapies, the results of systematic reviews of acupuncture show that it is effective for chronic back pain, dental pain, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal endoscopy, idiopathic headache, postoperative nausea and vomiting, oocyte retrieval, and osteoarthritis of the knee. However, the clinical evidence section concludes with this:

Because of numerous methodological and other problems, the current evidence allows ample room for interpretations. Thus different experts arrive at different conclusions. For example, Linde et al stated in 2001 that ‘convincing evidence is available only for postoperative nausea, for which acupuncture appears to be of benefit, and smoking cessation where acupuncture is no more effective than sham acupuncture’. While Ramey and Simpson, in their review of systematic reviews from the same year, were even more sceptical: ‘effectiveness could not be established with confidence for any condition studied’.
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And this 'Systematic review of systematic reviews of acupuncture published 1996-2005' concludes that systematic reviews have overstated the effectiveness of acupuncture by including studies that are likely to be biased and that they provide no robust evidence that acupuncture works for any indication:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conte...00004/art00016;jsessionid=265esf5ou8rc0.alice

So it would seem that things aren’t looking too good for acupuncturists in the long run.
 
Miss Anthrope, even having 500000 subjects, confounding variables can mean that there is no significant effect found, even though a smaller, but more accurate, study demonstrates conclusively that the effect is highly significant. As Capsid indicated, what matters is the statistical significance. The statistical significance here is far too high to be due to chance, especially considering the replications.

Bule Wode, the placebo effect is not in operation here. My earlier comments explained this.
 
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