Finally read those two links! Well, listened to the one, and read the other. They’re great links, the pair of them, and together do give an excellent idea about acupuncture.
Without a doubt, basis these, and particularly the latter (SBM) report, acupuncture would seem to be a complete sham. Very strongly outperforms no treatment; but on the other hand, returns exactly the same result when you poke around with needles at random points, without telling the patients they’re random points. That’s like the definition of placebo, right?
So that seems cut and dried. Except, I suppose there still remains the part where we do the textbook skeptics thing, the laborious part where we actually check this out for ourselves by poring over research reports.
So there was that one report there that had a very high placebo reading, but an even higher, and significantly higher, treatment result. But that’s just the one report, one study.
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I guess I’m with you now, in thinking that likely enough this thing’s complete bull. Because, hell, it’s not even an actual ancient “traditional” treatment at all, not as it is actually practiced. So that, if it did turn out that it works, then that would be happenstance, an astonishing coincidence, right?
On the other hand, I guess the properly skeptical thing to do would be to leave aside qualitative matters like those, and just focus on actual research reports. As far as that, I guess it’s wide open so far, at least in terms of our having actually examined stuff ourselves. If anything, it’s open just a wee bit on the side of acupuncture working, just maybe.
Hm, so where does that leave us? Probably not, very likely not; but maybe yes after all? That kind of sums up where I find myself on this!
…It would be cool if in this thread we ended up actually doing a bit of that latter thing too, of actually looking up acupuncture research, and seeing where that takes us.