Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> The article doesn't say that sham acupuncture is just as effective.

Maybe I'm misreading the second sentence, which says
"""
But the results also suggest that faked procedures, in which needles are 
incorrectly inserted, can be just as effective.
"""

> LiveScience isn't a journal, 

I thought I saw a link there to the actual study, but I see I'm wrong. 
However, google is still your friend.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/114/5/1242

http://www.google.com/search?q=accupuncture+double-blind

http://www.google.com/search?q=sham+acupuncture+study


so I will give them the benefit of doubt
> that they didn't misquote things, but still take their opinion with salt.
> 
> If that article is referring to
> http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab007587.html then it doesn't say
> that acupuncture to the wrong points was just as effective. From the
> abstract of "Acupuncture for tension-type headache", Linde K et al:
> 
>> Main results
>> Eleven trials with 2317 participants (median 62, range 10 to 1265) met the
inclusion criteria. Two large trials compared acupuncture to treatment of acute
headaches or routine care only. Both found statistically significant and clinically
relevant short-term (up to 3 months) benefits of acupuncture over control for
response, number of headache days and pain intensity. Long-term effects (beyond 3
months) were not investigated. Six trials compared acupuncture with a sham acupuncture
intervention, and five of the six provided data for meta-analyses. Small but
statistically significant benefits of acupuncture over sham were found for response as
well as for several other outcomes. Three of the four trials comparing acupuncture
with physiotherapy, massage or relaxation had important methodological or reporting
shortcomings. Their findings are difficult to interpret, but collectively suggest
slightly better results for some outcomes in the control groups.
>>
>> Authors' conclusions
>> In the previous version of this review, evidence in support of acupuncture for
tension-type headache was considered insufficient. Now, with six additional trials,
the authors conclude that acupuncture could be a valuable non-pharmacological tool in
patients with frequent episodic or chronic tension-type headaches.
> 
> And for migraine headaches, it seems that the placebo effect is strong
> enough that real needles are not needed. But, same authors, so perhaps
> that speaks more about migraine headaches than it does about acupuncture.
> (http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab001218.html)
> 
>> Authors' conclusions
>> In the previous version of this review, evidence in support of acupuncture for
migraine prophylaxis was considered promising but insufficient. Now, with 12
additional trials, there is consistent evidence that acupuncture provides additional
benefit to treatment of acute migraine attacks only or to routine care. There is no
evidence for an effect of 'true' acupuncture over sham interventions, though this is
difficult to interpret, as exact point location could be of limited importance.
Available studies suggest that acupuncture is at least as effective as, or possibly
more effective than, prophylactic drug treatment, and has fewer adverse effects.
Acupuncture should be considered a treatment option for patients willing to undergo
this treatment.


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
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Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now 
>>> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in 
>>> the body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)
>>>
>>
>> It is nonsense.
> 
> Thanks for clearing that up for us. I guess all the actual medical 
> doctors can stop looking into it now.
> 
Yep.. Right along with "alternative medicine", which results in stupid 
BS like one guy a while back that nearly died from a treatable genetic 
disorder, because the doctor looked him over and concluded he was merely 
lacking energy, so prescribed an "herbal supplement", until he didn't 
feel any better and went to the emergency room. It took, ironically, one 
look from a nurse to rush him into a better doctor.

Medical doctors are not, for the most part, scientists. Some manage to 
pass their examines while believing in creationism, denying germ 
theories of disease, and thinking that the brain has nothing to do with 
"thinking". They are basically human repair techs, who know how to 
determine, when they bother to *actually* apply stuff, instead of 
picking and choosing which things to look for (in some thankfully rare 
cases), to diagnosis.

They are not trained in double blind studies, they do no conduct 
experiments (nor would they be allowed to, considering the consequences 
of what they would be experimenting on), they are not even often aware 
of *every* detail of their own practice, never mind necessarily their 
own specialty, and often, the things they end up trying, like 
acupuncture, isn't even *in* their own specialty. In short, most of them 
a) will make mistakes that a more careful study would catch and b) don't 
know how to properly conduct such a study.

There are some that *are* and *do*. Guess which ones are producing the 
negative results and saying it doesn't work, and which ones claim its 
effective... Others, do know, and have been caught making claims that 
don't hold up, when looking at the data. I.e., their results are based 
on confirmation bias, not proper testing or analysis.

The only reason people are still "studying" it is that there are a great 
many people obsessed with the idea that it does still work (just look at 
the huge and growing amount of new "alternative" BS being sold every 
year), and an endless line of non-specialist, non-scientist, non-trained 
in such investigation, doctors jumping in to look at something that is 
pretty much dead at this point. Give it another 20 years, maybe, and 
acupuncture will be "fringe", like like homeopathy. And, like 
Chiropractic treatment, which is, I repeat, *not* provided by medical 
doctors, but a side line industry with its own "schools", it will 
probably still be used, despite all evidence that its pure gibberish.

Again.. All the studies done to find mechanisms for both provide none, 
all evidence for both suggest it doesn't work like described, the 
effects of both might be provided by less inconvenient (or in one case, 
dangerous) means, and the studies that do suggest it works don't 
generally ask, until recently, why, how, or even 'if' it works in a way 
that is better than placebo.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> The only way to scientifically determine whether a claim is valid or 
>>> not is to, you know, actually investigate it. If we wrote off 
>>> anything that sounded too weird, human kind would never have advanced 
>>> anywhere.
>>>
>> No argument there. Now.. Given how only the people that cheat, lie, 
>> stack the deck, or consider "Blair Witch" style theatrics, followed by 
>> babbling, "That random sound sort of sounded like...", or, "Gee that 
>> random camera glitch moved like moved 'purposefully', why can't we 
>> drop the supposed paranormal already? Oh, and I love that last one, 
>> "move purposefully". By whose definition, by what criteria? That its 
>> less random than some other random light? More? Moved in what you 
>> *think* is a pattern? What the hell does "moved purposefully" even 
>> fraking mean without context of the ability to determine what the 
>> purpose *is*?
> 
> The military weren't studying the entire zoo of paranormal claims, they 
> studied one specific aspect: the claim that certain people can see 
> events distant in space and possibly time. This one is quite easy to 
> verify one way or the other. They tried; the statistics were 
> unimpressive; they gave up and shut down the project. Seems like a 
> non-WTF to me.
> 
>> Its been tested and retested ***over and over*** thousands of times, 
> 
> It has *now*. Not sure about back when this study was done...
> 
lol True enough. Doesn't stop people from *continuing* to test it. There 
is even a group of *ex-subjects* from the original military test that 
are still busy babbling about how it *does* work, the military still 
secretly uses it, and using the same unimpressive BS as "proof" of it. 
Go figure..

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Sadly, while plausible, its not the case. It been done using the "wrong"
>> places, and even using needles are fake, and don't cause any sort of
>> puncture at all. In fact, the only thing that seems to effect outcomes,
>> based on the experiments done by one person, who used to be an advocate
>> of it, until he started wondering why the hell the multitude of
>> acupressure methods neither agree with each other, or the acupuncture
>> chart, is if the explanation "sounds" plausible to the patient, and the
>> practitioner appears to believe it themselves. Mostly the later. If you
>> stick someone in the room to do the procedure that pretends to think its
>> all BS, and who won't provide any facts, details, or explanation, the
>> result is complete failure.
> 
> Have any links to those studies, I would love to see it in print and be
> able to pass it around to others.
> 

Wish I knew where to find them. Hmm. Ask Penn and Teller? They where the 
ones that tracked down the guy, whose name I can't even remember. But, 
he was, apparently, for a while, one of the #1 people running around 
advocating its use, and even still has the bus he used to treat people, 
as part of spreading the idea around. He now uses it to show people why 
its bunk.

And for why its not placebo.. I never said it wasn't. But we don't use 
placebos, in most cases, for one key reason, and two lesser ones. The 
main one is ethics. To make a placebo work you have to basically *lie* 
to a patient. The others are 1) lying about the effect of such a 
treatment allows those denying that it "is" placebo to continue to 
suggest that its not, and that a whole host of other BS is real too, 2) 
some of those things *can be* and *are* dangerous, under certain 
circumstance, and 3) people may opt to use the placebo, and refuse 
*real* treatment. The later two happen all the time, and people die from 
it every single year, some of them children.

You can't lie to patients, and you can't support things that result in 
people failing to take treatments for *serious* conditions, by only 
taking the placebo. And then... there are the "doctors" who haven't 
managed to get their license pulled, because they are not *technically* 
doing anything they *know* (or at least believe) is wrong, who may hurt 
or kill people by advocating the placebo *instead* of the real 
treatments. And, since no rules exist to prevent it, other than the 
ethics rules, which deny use of such things at all, opening the door to 
them means you have no way to remove such doctors from their practice 
for malpractice.

Its literally one of those slippery slope issues that it would be *far* 
better to avoid than advocate openly.

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>>> Its been tested and retested ***over and over*** thousands of times, 
>>
>> It has *now*. Not sure about back when this study was done...
>>
> lol True enough. Doesn't stop people from *continuing* to test it. There 
> is even a group of *ex-subjects* from the original military test that 
> are still busy babbling about how it *does* work, the military still 
> secretly uses it, and using the same unimpressive BS as "proof" of it. 
> Go figure..

Some people are just delusional. And hey, let's face it, who wouldn't 
want to believe that they actually have secret super-powers and/or make 
craploads of money?

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>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
> 
> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
> happened much since the invention of the printing press.

Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".

(I still find it amusing that if you plot the names of all the famous 
mathematicians on a graph, there's this big cluster in the middle, about 
400 years ago, and there's Pythagorus at the other end of the graph. And 
seemingly nothing inbetween. Also seemingly nothing since a few hundred 
years ago. I guess mathematicians aren't all that famous any more...)

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Darren New wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> The article doesn't say that sham acupuncture is just as effective.
> 
> Maybe I'm misreading the second sentence, which says
> """
> But the results also suggest that faked procedures, in which needles are
> incorrectly inserted, can be just as effective.
> """
> 

Sorry, I rearranged my post to make it more readable, and ended up with
that line out of context. I was refering to the articles by Linde, which
the LiveScience page seemed to be referencing. In those, they found
that, for tension headaches, actual acupuncture worked marginally but
statistically better than sham acupuncture. For migraines, they both
were more effective than certain drugs.

>> LiveScience isn't a journal, 
> 
> I thought I saw a link there to the actual study, but I see I'm wrong.
> However, google is still your friend.
> 

Yes, it is, that is how I got the other two articles on Cochrane that
found that it was effective for certain things. Google is a nice large
place to look, and with a tonne of studies on acupuncture and the
placebo effect I thought that if there was a single large meta study
proving it was ineffective at just about everything, as Patrick
suggested in the post I first replied to, then I either missed it or was
searching in the wrong terms. All I found were cases where the efficacy
was either proven or disproved for certain symptoms or disorders when
compared to either drugs, placebo drugs, or placebo acupuncture.

I hate linking to Elsevier studies, for reasons that would take a whole
other thread, but:
Acupuncture doesn't work for chronic pain
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304395999003048
Real needles do work better for rotator cuff tendinitis
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304395999001074

That is just two that google scholar pulls up. The nearest to an overall
study, that I can find today, is
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1295163/ and the results
there are . . . odd? Placebos are known to have an effect in roughly
1/3rd of people, so if 60% benefit from either acupuncture or sham
acupuncture, then something else is happening.

> http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/114/5/1242
> 

Acupuncture doesn't cure allergies, alright that I can believe. Neither
does aspirin, or cipro, or valium.

I get the feeling that there are some things acupuncture can be used for
in modern medicine, and others that it shouldn't be used for.

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Wish I knew where to find them. Hmm. Ask Penn and Teller? They where the
> ones that tracked down the guy, whose name I can't even remember. But,
> he was, apparently, for a while, one of the #1 people running around
> advocating its use, and even still has the bus he used to treat people,
> as part of spreading the idea around. He now uses it to show people why
> its bunk.

I will keep digging then. I keep journal search engines bookmarked,
because I keep finding my self needing things to read.

> And for why its not placebo.. I never said it wasn't. But we don't use
> placebos, in most cases, for one key reason, and two lesser ones. The
> main one is ethics. To make a placebo work you have to basically *lie*
> to a patient. The others are 1) lying about the effect of such a
> treatment allows those denying that it "is" placebo to continue to
> suggest that its not, and that a whole host of other BS is real too, 2)
> some of those things *can be* and *are* dangerous, under certain
> circumstance, and 3) people may opt to use the placebo, and refuse
> *real* treatment. The later two happen all the time, and people die from
> it every single year, some of them children.

"We" . . . If you are speaking from medical training, I will defer to
better knowledge of the field. Just let me know. All I know is from
years on the patient side of things.

Beyond that, I got my wording mixed up. Happens, I suck at English some
days. I wasn't openly advocating the use of placebos over all other
drugs. I was trying to say that if acupuncture and sham acupuncture have
similar success rates for Disorder X (what ever that individual symptom
or ailment is), and that success rate is higher than the known placebo
effect of around 30%, then why not use it. Why not study it?

> You can't lie to patients,

Yes you can. Every time a doctor gives out some antibiotics for a viral
infection, that's a placebo. Sugar pills were found to have roughly the
same effective treatment rate for mild depression and anxiety. So
someone gets a mild anti-depressant for times when they are just feeling
blue, another placebo.

"Just feeling blue" may be a local phrase. What I reference is feeling
justifiably depressed and sad; dog or parents died, wife left, house
burned down, things of that nature.

> and you can't support things that result in
> people failing to take treatments for *serious* conditions, by only
> taking the placebo.

Was not suggesting that at all. If another medical treatment has better
results, great. But, benefit analysis needs to be done, between the
doctor and patient, on the side effects too.

> And then... there are the "doctors" who haven't
> managed to get their license pulled, because they are not *technically*
> doing anything they *know* (or at least believe) is wrong, who may hurt
> or kill people by advocating the placebo *instead* of the real
> treatments. And, since no rules exist to prevent it, other than the
> ethics rules, which deny use of such things at all, opening the door to
> them means you have no way to remove such doctors from their practice
> for malpractice.

Those same fake doctors have an arsenal of things they can claim work,
with propped up studies that back them up. Hunt them down, sure, but it
doesn't hurt to look at their data just to see if one in a thousand of
them might have been on to something real.

> Its literally one of those slippery slope issues that it would be *far*
> better to avoid than advocate openly.
>

Post a reply to this message

Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> Invisible wrote:
>>>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now 
>>>> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in 
>>>> the body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)
>>>>
>>>
>>> It is nonsense.
>>
>> Thanks for clearing that up for us. I guess all the actual medical 
>> doctors can stop looking into it now.
>>
> Yep.. 

<long 100% nonsequitur rant deleted>

Wow. OK, I think I'll just give up now.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Invisible wrote:
>>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
>>
>> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
>> happened much since the invention of the printing press.
> 
> Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".

Yep. The first "modern" press was the mid-1400's.  There were some in China 
that didn't work out all that well due to the lack of an alphabet.  Plus, 
there were wood-cuts which again for some reason didn't work out all that well.

> seemingly nothing inbetween. 

Quite possibly due to either libraries burning down, or due to math not 
being all that useful without science, once the basics you need for 
architecture census and such are figured out.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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