SOURCE:
SCIENTIFIC AMERICANhttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article/research-casts-doubt-on-the-value-of-acupuncture/By Jeneen Interlandi
In 1971 then New York Times columnist James Reston had his appendix removed at a hospital in China. The article he wrote about his experience still reverberates today. His doctors used a standard set of injectable drugs—lidocaine and benzocaine—to anesthetize him before surgery, he explained. But they controlled his postoperative pain with something quite different: a Chinese medical practice known as acupuncture, which involved sticking tiny needles into his skin at very specific locations and gently twisting them. According to Reston, it worked.
Acupuncture is based on the concept of qi (pronounced “chi”), a life force or energy that practitioners say flows through the body along 20 distinct routes called meridians. Blocked meridians are believed to cause illness by disrupting the flow of qi. Inserting acupuncture needles at specific points along specific meridians is thought to clear those blockages and restore qi's natural flow, which in turn restores patients to health. Scientists have long understood that qi is not a legitimate biological entity; many studies have shown that the effects of acupuncture are the same whether needles are placed along the meridians or at random locations around the body. But the acupuncture proponents among them have argued that acupuncture itself might still work, albeit by an as yet unknown mechanism.
Readers back home were fascinated. In a rush of excitement over this new, exotic knowledge, the original story was quickly jumbled. Before long, it was commonly believed that the Chinese doctors had used acupuncture not just after Reston's appendectomy but as anesthesia for the surgery itself. Interest in acupuncture soared in the U.S. and has remained high ever since.
But it turned out that acupuncture as Reston described it was not the enduring bit of ancient Chinese wisdom enthusiasts supposed. In fact, the procedure had been written off as superstition back in the 1600s and abandoned altogether in favor of a more science-based approach to healing by the 1800s. Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong had only revived acupuncture in the 1950s as part of his initiative to convince the Chinese people that their government had a plan for keeping them healthy despite a woeful dearth of financial and medical resources.
Even more impressive than how well Mao's campaign worked in China at the time is how well it is working in the U.S. today. Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo acupuncture for conditions ranging from pain to post-traumatic stress disorder, and the federal government spends tens of millions of dollars to study the protocol.
So far that research has been disappointing. Studies have found no meaningful difference between acupuncture and a wide range of sham treatments. Whether investigators penetrate the skin or not, use needles or toothpicks, target the particular locations on the body cited by acupuncturists or random ones, the same proportion of patients experience more or less the same degree of pain relief (the most common condition for which acupuncture is administered and the most well researched). “We have no evidence that [acupuncture] is anything more than theatrical placebo,” says Harriet Hall, a retired family physician and U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who has studied, and long been a critic of, alternative medicine.
But the news is not all bad. In the process of putting acupuncture to the test, scientists have gained insights that could lead to the development of new and urgently needed methods for treating pain.
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