> But except for the parent and a lot of other people.
I've seen placebos work too - most of my childhood homeopathic medication was probably placebos.
For a single person, the important factor for treatment is outcome - not statistical significance. If something makes you feel better, the outcome is achieved. I've also seen doctors exploit it, because their goal is aligned with your outcome - not studying the causation.
However, the problem is when you offer advice to a skeptic, the placebo effect is out of the picture.
And it can be worse, the time spent with the placebo might be lost time to the sufferer where it plays out as "If only you'd come to us earlier" elsewhere.
There are long-term consequences, when you offer medical advice without the expertise beyond your outcome ... outcomes heavily bifurcate for people who trust you (strong placebo effect or time lost waiting for results).
Seriously. I always roll my eyes when somebody claims that acupuncture "doesn't work," because it's worked for me on multiple occasions. Typically, it comes from people who have never tried it.
A little over four years ago, I had a ton of shoulder pain. I went to two doctors, had an MRI scan, and was prescribed physical therapy. After all of that, I was still in pain, and neither of the doctors could figure out why, so I decided to try acupuncture for the first time. I went to Chinatown, got needles put in me, and got some electricity sent to my shoulder. I left the shop about 30 minutes later, and about 70% of my pain was gone. I woke up with next morning with only a tiny bit of pain left.
The pain didn't come back, even after months. I eventually found a doctor who figured out what was wrong, and through a better round of physical therapy, I was able to eradicate my shoulder pain permanently.
Maybe acupuncture didn't solve my problems completely, and of course it doesn't work for everything (e.g. weight loss, cancer, etc.), but to simply say that it "doesn't work" is ludicrous.
Why after decades then has acupuncture not been shown to work in any rigorous high quality studies? It's not like it hasn't been studied and proper studies are significantly more reliable than acendotes.
Thanks for the link. I'm not claiming to be an expert so can you explain what the values here mean? How significant an improvement are these numbers and how do they compare to just doing nothing?
> It had moderate effect compared with non-acupuncture care for musculoskeletal pain (standardised mean difference [SMD] 0.55, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.51 to 0.58), osteoarthritis (SMD 0.57, 95% CI 0.50 to 0.64) and headache (SMD 0.42, 95% CI 0.37 to 0.46).
Also, the comparisons to acupuncture vs sham acupuncture...is this implying that acupunture has some validity (meridians etc.) or just that the sham wasn't convincing enough? Why would acupuncture perform better when meridians have no scientific plausibility?
I've no doubt an elaborate procedure such as acupuncture produces a strong placebo effect but something that isn't better than a placebo shouldn't be considered as working in my opinion.
Seriously. I always roll my eyes when somebody claims that acupuncture "does work," because the placebo effect worked for them on multiple occasions. Typically, it comes from people who don't want to admit they were cured by a placebo, otherwise it would work all the time, for everyone.
Acupuncture is a sham because sham acupuncture appears to do just as well. What matters is if you get stung by a real needle. All the acupuncture-specific things, like meridians, points, qi, are just tosh, which means pseudo-acupuncture can be performed by any nurse, and does not require a costly 'expert'. So "real acupuncture" is just, in fact, an unnecessary ornament that can be discarded.
Having been raised by your average new-age / alternative medicine parents, and having believed and used these things until my mid-twenties, I'm not surprised that needles do have an effect. I am also not surprised it does not come from acupuncture proper.
If you say 'having vague pain points stung by needles is better than placebo', then I would agree with you, but that's quite different than saying that acupuncture works.
It "doesn't work" because it isn't repeatable or predictable. My wife has a similar story to yours... I had a zero effect experience with the same practitioner.
Like chiropractic, there is "something" there, but it's mostly mild physical relief + belief/placebo effect.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for pain relief where the alternatives are pretty high impact (surgery, ineffective narcotics, other treatments that lose efficiency over time). The problem is there are practitioners who claim to cure cancer, etc, and there's no way for anyone to vet that.
