I'm surprised an acupuncturist even suggested they could treat a shoulder injury. Most licensed acupuncturists I know would not dream of suggesting they could repair tissue damage. I know my wife's own acupuncturist would have referred her to an orthopedist. Very odd. Are you sure they were licensed? The condition fell worse because of the acupuncturist, or in spite of their treatment? You made it seem like the acupuncturist "crippled", but did the crippling start before the acupuncturist, and the CAM treatment was merely unsuccessful? I was surprised, because yours is the first anecdote I've ever heard of a CAM. I've heard hundreds in the opposite direction. Anomalies are always interesting. Modern acupuncture is not really what I would consider a "naturalist" remedy, either, unless you're talking a CAM practioner out in the rural wild using home-made gear. Modern acupuncturists are regulated/licensed, they use sterile equipment, work out of modernized clinics, and also introduce things like electrostimulation. Stim is used widely in both acupuncture and modern medicine for manipulating muscle tissue, and it is highly effective for treating lower back injuries, etc. Acupuncture is an art that has changed with time. Many licensed acupuncturists won't even talk/follow the ancient meridian/channel/reservoir concepts..this is something you see more with TCM healers, herbal pharmacies etc.
Very few prescription drugs prevent death. Most prescription medications are for non-life threatening things like acne to heartburn to depression, preventing conception, assisting pregnancy.... And, every single one of those things I mentioned has a list of drugs that has caused death, miscarriages, and insanity. Again, nobody argued dumping modern medicine. I am pointing out the hypocrisy of some MDs dismissing acupuncture as "unproven", and in fact campaigning against it. They should stick to campaigning against what they know, and make prescription medicines safer. This is a VERY biased source. Bias works in both directions on the CAM issue. I like the fact that the first case claims it's basically acupuncture's fault that someone who got AIDS died. So, if I catch Ebola and go to an acupuncturist, I go on this list as a CAM casualty? Give me a break. At least the CAM university studies are usually somewhat scientific. This stuff is more like the online "Birther" and "9/11 Truth" petitions. Sorry, I'll buy the clinical studies (for or against CAM)...that link is misinformative. Here's another great one...kid suffered seizures. Tried acupuncture. Seized and drowned in a pool. Acupuncture claims another victim!!
Nobody likes Accupuncture here Wooden Hare! Now get out of here! Hannibal needs to come in with a "get off my lawn" shout.
If you allow bogus treatment to go unchallenged or promote treatment that doesn't work you create an environment where foregoing proper treatment seems reasonable. So personally I'd put such deaths down as the "fault" of all SCAM practitioners, accupuncture included. Still more than SCAMs do then? Even basic antibiotics can prevent death. Infection was/is a very common cause of death. Modern drugs/medcine has irradicated small pox. So that's an estimated 300–500 million deaths prevented in the 20th century alone. Let me now when accupuncture reaches that tally. Accupunctue is profoundly unscientific at its very core. It takes an unproven premise (chi and meridians) and runs with it. You can make the study as scientific as you like there'll still be that massive hurdle to cross.
In all honesty I'm sure acupuncture has benefits that could be similar to something like seeing a legit chiropractor, or using massage on really tight knots in your muscles. It may even have use in physical therapy, but it doesn't seem to have the same amount of study and application yet along with not having an "across the board" certifying force behind it. Until then, I'm very skeptical about people poking needles into me.
Skepticism is fine. I am a big skeptic, even of acupuncture. Even of Chinese kung fu legends. But I also know many, many folks who swear it helped them. Who am I to point them to sites like whatstheharm.net or dismiss their experience with "well the latest study said the benefit is SMALL!! HAHAHAHA YOU FOOL!" Thanks for helping explain the biased source. Your bias is pretty extreme. Anyone who believes the data at whatstheharm.net is scientific has a pretty warped sense of what "Scientific" means. AT least CAM studies in 2014 make attempts at honest data gathering and research...this kind of site is for online conspiracy theorists. Actually, acupuncture comes from prescientific, observation-based medicine. The theories and charts etc do not predate the practice....the practice produced those theories and charts to help understand the phenomenon. Even if it is prescientific, it was developed by observation, like any good scientific process. "Chi", going ALL the way back, is merely the Chinese graph representing "life". Meridians are not even the original Chinese name...but even with that, the Chinese were referring to "channels" within the body that transmit "life". Western medicine has no problem with identifying channels like this in the body. There are electrical channels, chemical channels, tissue channels...so the meridian concept is not entirely foreign. It's more like a "first stab" at how the flows within the body occur. The Chinese are responsible for a lot of "first stabs" at scientific endeavors...this is how the Chinese alchemy came to develop gunpowder. You know what's really unscientific? All the statistics on the header of your link. Remember, that first number includes drowning victims. The entire list of junk science data pretending to be an expose. Yes, this kind of misinformation is a big hurdle for CAM. Painkiller over-prescription and abuse has easily surpassed these numbers. So again, why are you pressing the "dangers" of acupuncture when most CAM studies produce positive results, placebo or otherwise? So many studies so far....in prescription drug clinical trials/studies, patients often die. Again, where is the tally of death/injury/disease caused during clinical acupuncture studies? It does not exist, and no, you can't count AIDs victims, bath salt users, or drowning victims. You need to find someone who has literally died right after receiving treatment, or whose autopsy links back to acupuncture, in order for a real correlation. Now who is being scientifical?
It's always difficult to know what to make of things in differently countries. Wooden Hare acupuncture is unregulated in the UK. TBH most modern acupuncturists are more comfortable with trying to match treatment to western diagnoses but in truth the theory and practice are still mainly about trying to balance meridians etc. Some are more extreme (I mean extreme) and some are essentially doing dry needling following a western orthopaedic approach. How do I know? I started training in the 1980's and I've used needles off and on ever since. I know lots of people in practice in a number of different schools of thought/countries. LFD
I'm pretty skeptical about most of these 'traditional' remedies - the lack of evidence upsets my inner science nerd - but I had acupunture on my dodgy back several years back and the short term results were brilliant. I've read a reasonable amount about it, and the results for back pain are mixed. My own theory on it is that it works a bit like deep tissue massage. In that if the needles happen to hit a trigger point or some scar tissue and release the tension then positive results will be had. If the needles miss the tense areas then the patient's response will not be as positive, which could explain why, for back pain at least, the results are mixed.
I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of MDs would very much like to make prescription medicines safer too. But they don't make the drugs, they just prescribe them. The existence of non-evidence-based, or corrupted evidence-based pharmaceuticals is not a good enough reason to add more non-evidence-based treatments to the mix. No matter how harmless the side-effects.
I'm not really. It's not that dangerous. But you basically implied accupuncture hasn't killed or harmed anyone when it has clearly done some harm (inc. death). Evemn if that harm comes from going to an accupuncturist rather than some proper medicine. Accupuncture does almost nothing, or very little. And like anything with minimal effects it's going to have minimal side effects too. It's probably mor dangerous that homeopathy. Indeed. That's the problem. Without an understanding of placebo, confirmation bias, the need for proper blinding and a whole host of other way we can be fooled into thinking something works, that sort of medicine is very prone to being wrong.
Frodo gets a prize! Treatment of 'ah shi' points is expected in TCM whether with needles or deep massage. Perfectly mirrors what you see in the trigger point schools of thought. Pain on palpation is considered an indication of a blockage of chi that needs to be removed (and then the channel - read meridian- is dredged to clear the path for getting the free movement of energy (or so it's said). Releasing trigger points with rollers/ballks/knobbers etc does much the same without risk of infection yadda yadda... LFD
That's basically the rationalization they were using to suggest acupuncture to me at the VA. After my own experience with the physical therapist and the back nobber, working certain trigger points are extremely beneficial. With that, new trigger points seem to pop up once specific ones are resolved, and even the physical therapist from last week was mentioning I had a lot of bad knots that weren't even bothering me. It wasn't until after I started working the really bad trigger points that those knots she mentioned started bothering me. With that, if the physical therapist has a hard time locating the points that have to be worked on first and has to have in depth communication to figure out the best route of massage where pressure encompasses a large area, how likely is it that somebody who hasn't went through an intense certifying process is going to be able to slip a tiny needle in exactly the right place to provide relief?
I won't disagree. Where I think we agree is that placebo itself is an interesting, and relatively undeveloped area of scientific research, and if acupuncture is related to it, it is also worthy of further study...not campaigns of "CAM KILLED MY BROTHER!" How the human body heals itself is poorly understood by science. Stem cell research and the like is really just getting started... If I told you 50 years ago I could grow you a new kidney from some of your bone marrow cells, would that have sounded like quackery? 50 years from now the "mystery" of acupuncture, one way or another, will probably be old news. Maybe then a billion fewer people will accept it. Who knows. Good discussion ladies and gents. I have to hop for now.
Oooh, what do I get? Is it cake? I will say the chappie who did my acupuncture had training as a physio in Japan (where their physio is a lot more 'hands on' than ours) as well as doing the acupuncture, so I suspect his injury treatment knowledge was a lot better than some of the less well trained practitioners. Having had deep tissue work (and done lots of SMR) since then, I suspect the areas the acupuncture needles hit were the areas that tense up and cause problems in my back anyway.
The statements about acupuncture providing no effect beyond placebo are untrue. Most previous acupuncture studies were small, poorly designed, and lacked sufficient controls. Drawing scientific conclusions from those flawed studies would be unwise. Unless you take issue with their methods, it's pretty hard to argue against an 18,000 patient meta-analysis supporting acupuncture efficacy in pain management. Will it cure cancer? No, probably not, and any study that supports that position you can probably safely believe. Does it help considerably with some forms of pain? Yes, it appears to quite well. Inarguably pharmaceuticals are invaluable to modern medicine, but I think you might be surprised at exactly how many people die as a direct result of their poorly applied overuse. And before anyone states that it's much safer and better in the UK, it probably isn't. The rates of medically unnecessary deaths were identical between the US and the UK in recent years, though I'm not sure how many are prescription related there. And no, I'm not stating that you should forgo modern medicine and get acupuncture. I'm only citing data to correct some inaccuracies that were posted.
