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Acupuncture - scam or legit?

Well done studies show it only has a placebo effect.

For some types of chronic pain where the only thing Western medicine has to offer is narcotic pain meds, some health care providers believe that if acupuncture provides pain relief they are not against it.

It also depends on how much money you are being charged for it.

:welcome4
 
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Anything to do with balancing chi, needles in meridians or anything with the word energy attached is going to be bunkum. We know that’s all folklore.

Some people make the claim that acupuncture works by stimulating or impeding blood flow to a particular area. Now acupuncture could have an effect as it is a physical injury to your body. I’ve had acupuncture 3 times, all recommended and performed by qualified physiotherapists, and I certainly react to the needles being inserted. I develop within minutes a red circular patch about 10cm in diameter centred on the site of the needle, so the needles do something measurable in me.

However does that mean it does what it is claimed to do, for example pain relief or stopping smoking? Well as Skeptic Ginger says above studies have been done and no effect beyond what can be explained by the placebo effect was found.

I’m pretty much sure there is no veracity in the claims.
 
Acupuncture? I confess to having mixed feelings about it. I mean I can see a logic in the notion, that sticking needles into places that short circuit nerves is a mechanism, that can perhaps stop signals of pain getting back to the brain. The Chinese have been doing this for some time.

The notion that the effect will continue, after the needles have been removed, I struggle with.

In Australia the alternative medicine guys will often offer acupuncture as a treatment; along with a list of other alternative treatments as long as your arm. The theme seems to be that anything alternative to science based medicine is good.

I visited one of these naturopath/chiropractor, and all the other flavours of alt med, (all listed at the entrance), on the recommendation of a friend many years ago. I was suffering from a persistent nose condition that required surgery after regular intervals.

The practitioner recommended acupuncture, and described how he would be inserting needles in all sorts of places, (including the back of my hands :confused:), and I would have to about three treatments over three visits.

I asked him what the chances of a cure were and to describe the mechanism. "How does it work." I asked. "About 60% chance of success." he answered glibly, but confessed to not knowing how it worked. I walked out of there.

I wonder what orifice he plucked that 60% figure out of.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Well done studies show it only has a placebo effect.

For some types of chronic pain where the only thing Western medicine has to offer is narcotic pain meds, some health care providers believe that if acupuncture provides pain relief they are not against it.

It also depends on how much money you are being charged for it.

:welcome4
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Thanks for the welcome! Yes, I saw on Wiki that acupuncture is a pseudoscience, but there seems to be an acceptance of it in our society. I think it's because pain relief is very subjective and who can prove that it doesn't give relief?
 
Thor 2 said:
Acupuncture? I confess to having mixed feelings about it. I mean I can see a logic in the notion, that sticking needles into places that short circuit nerves is a mechanism, that can perhaps stop signals of pain getting back to the brain. The Chinese have been doing this for some time.

The notion that the effect will continue, after the needles have been removed, I struggle with.

In Australia the alternative medicine guys will often offer acupuncture as a treatment; along with a list of other alternative treatments as long as your arm. The theme seems to be that anything alternative to science based medicine is good.

I visited one of these naturopath/chiropractor, and all the other flavours of alt med, (all listed at the entrance), on the recommendation of a friend many years ago. I was suffering from a persistent nose condition that required surgery after regular intervals.

The practitioner recommended acupuncture, and described how he would be inserting needles in all sorts of places, (including the back of my hands :confused:), and I would have to about three treatments over three visits.

I asked him what the chances of a cure were and to describe the mechanism. "How does it work." I asked. "About 60% chance of success." he answered glibly, but confessed to not knowing how it worked. I walked out of there.

I wonder what orifice he plucked that 60% figure out of.
Click to expand...

Lol! Yes, I have had it once before, and while it didn't hurt, I don't think it improved my back situation at all. I ended up getting the disc shaved by an orthopaedic surgeon which cured my sciatica.
 
Darat said:
Anything to do with balancing chi, needles in meridians or anything with the word energy attached is going to be bunkum. We know that’s all folklore.

Some people make the claim that acupuncture works by stimulating or impeding blood flow to a particular area. Now acupuncture could have an effect as it is a physical injury to your body. I’ve had acupuncture 3 times, all recommended and performed by qualified physiotherapists, and I certainly react to the needles being inserted. I develop within minutes a red circular patch about 10cm in diameter centred on the site of the needle, so the needles do something measurable in me.

However does that mean it does what it is claimed to do, for example pain relief or stopping smoking? Well as Skeptic Ginger says above studies have been done and no effect beyond what can be explained by the placebo effect was found.

I’m pretty much sure there is no veracity in the claims.
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Yeah, me too, thanks!
 
There seem to be 2 separate issues dealing with acupuncture...

1) Does jabbing people with needles have a potentially beneficial effect
2) Does it matter how/where the needles are jabbed

It is possible that acupuncture does work (for some things, like pain relief, because it causes the body to release hormones that naturally ease pain), but it doesn't matter where the needles are jabbed, and you could get the same effect getting acupuncture treatment from a chimp with Parkinson's disease randomly stabbing you as you could from a "professional" acupunturerist.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Well done studies show it only has a placebo effect.

For some types of chronic pain where the only thing Western medicine has to offer is narcotic pain meds, some health care providers believe that if acupuncture provides pain relief they are not against it.

It also depends on how much money you are being charged for it.

:welcome4
Click to expand...

Has anyone run studies? Wouldn't surprise me if the placebo effect is stronger the more that is paid for it.
 
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searchengineguy said:
... there seems to be an acceptance of it in our society.
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It's so bloody accepted across this side of the Tasman that acupuncturists can get paid by the government, like any actual health professional.

But then, so can chiropractors, which just goes to prove our system is crap.

Welcome along! Pity you're another Aussie, but you can't win 'em all.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Well done studies show it only has a placebo effect.
Click to expand...

If a condition is psychosomatic to begin with, a placebo effect may apparently be a cure for it I suppose.

For any real disease though, it won't work.

As a child, my mother, who believed in chiropractors, took me to see one fairly often. She had (and still has) a number of beliefs that I have since become very skeptical of.

Anyway, I went through a period as a child where I would get carsick. I would experience nausea any time I traveled by car. My mother took me to the chiropractor and he performed one of his "adjustments" and somehow this "cured" me. At the time I took it as proof that chiropractic worked. Now, in hindsight, I believe that this nausea I experienced was mostly psychosomatic in origin, and that the "adjustment" worked because I believed that it would work.

I imagine the same is true for acupuncture. It works for psychosomatic conditions to the extent that patients believe it will work.
 
There is an acupressure point where the bones of the thumb and forefinger meet, I think it's called Ho Ku. If you have a bad headache, you rub each one, and if one feels more sensitive than the other, deep massage it for a minute or two. Something like 2/3 or 3/4 of the time, your headache will go away, and I mean fast. Not sure if there is a conventional explanation, but it works more often than not for the fam and I.
 
This may be surprising to you, but this was from the Mayo Clinic saying that it was legit. This is why you shouldn't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.
"WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCE SHOW?
Although acupuncture has been used for thousands of years in Asia, the research community has started studying it only in the past few decades. The nature of acupuncture therapy involves tailoring treatments to the individual patient, and thus research on acupuncture has been difficult because of variable treatment interventions, techniques, and study size. Meta-analysis studies of acupuncture are limited because of the heterogeneity of pooling acupuncture treatment data. In 2005, Sood et al20 analyzed the considerable methodologic diversity in the Cochrane systematic reviews on acupuncture, which could introduce bias and complexity when reviewing acupuncture literature.
The number of acupuncture studies and randomized controlled trials has increased substantially since the 1997 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference highlighted several medical conditions in which acupuncture is effective or may be useful.21 In 2003, a review and analysis of reports on controlled clinical trials by the World Health Organization identified 28 diseases or conditions for which acupuncture has been proved effective.22 With the advent of such technological advances as functional magnetic resonance imaging, emerging evidence and research have found much promise in improving the understanding of acupuncture. Review of acupuncture research highlights a number of common conditions in which acupuncture may be efficacious.
CONCLUSION
In recent years, the practice and acceptance of acupuncture in the medical community and the general US public continue to increase. However, there are still challenges on how to fully integrate acupuncture into the Western medical paradigm. As acupuncture continues to withstand the test of time, the medical community must continue to investigate and provide evidence of its merits."
and
"Recent research has found that traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture therapy has a direct effect in the up-regulation of μ-opioid receptor binding availability in the central nervous system compared with placebo (sham) acupuncture."
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(13)00513-2/fulltext#secsectitle0070
 
Segnosaur said:
There seem to be 2 separate issues dealing with acupuncture...

1) Does jabbing people with needles have a potentially beneficial effect
2) Does it matter how/where the needles are jabbed

It is possible that acupuncture does work (for some things, like pain relief, because it causes the body to release hormones that naturally ease pain), but it doesn't matter where the needles are jabbed, and you could get the same effect getting acupuncture treatment from a chimp with Parkinson's disease randomly stabbing you as you could from a "professional" acupunturerist.
Click to expand...

I did read an interesting study where they compared traditional acupuncture with poking people in random places with cocktail sticks (without puncturing the skin). There was no difference.
Its been a long time but I'll see if I can dig that up again.
Yep, found it. They compared Individualised acupuncture, standard acupuncture and poking at random with toothpicks. The results of all these were the same.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2832641/
 
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Scam. Placebo at best.

As already mentioned, SBM has a load of stuff on it, Edzard Ernst and Orac likewise.

Oddly, I've just posted something in another thread about lack of any known biological mechanisms in a variety of things, including alt med. Centuries of dissection of corpses have never shown any meridians or the like; physics has not found qi or any similar form of energy.

When there is a plausible biological mechanism to discuss we can discuss it, until such time file under "How gullible do you want to be?"
 
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Oh, back problems are notorious for "sorting themselves out" as mysteriously as they start (WTAF my lumbar region has been doing over the last 2 months is anyone's guess, 'cos I have no idea: some days I've hardly been able to stand and yet today I'm fine. And no needles were involved, nor any medication).
 
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