News Clips: Pinning down acupuncture: It's a placebo - 0 views
heresthenews.blogspot.com/...wn-acupuncture-it-placebo.html
Acupuncture TCM Placebo Medicine Science
shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Feb 11
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some doctors seem to have embraced even disproven remedies. Take, for instance, a review of acupuncture research that appeared last July in the New England Journal of Medicine. This highly respected journal is one of the most widely read by doctors across specialities.In Acupuncture For Chronic Low Back Pain, the authors reviewed clinical trials done to assess if acupuncture actually helps in chronic low back pain. The most important meta-analysis available was a 2008 study involving 6,359 patients, which 'showed that real acupuncture treatments were no more effective than sham acupuncture treatments'.
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The authors then editorialised: 'There was nevertheless evidence that both real acupuncture and sham acupuncture were more effective than no treatment and that acupuncture can be a useful supplement to other forms of conventional therapy for low back pain.'
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First, they admit that pooled clinical trials of the best sort show that real acupuncture does no better than sham acupuncture. This should mean that acupuncture does not work - full stop. But then they say that both sham and real acupuncture work as well as the other and thus is useful. Translation: Please use acupuncture as a placebo on your patients; just don't let them know it is a placebo.
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I should add that I am not criticising TCM per se. Only acupuncture, a facet of TCM, albeit its most dramatic, is being scrutinised here. Chinese herbology must be analysed on its own merits.Interestingly, although acupuncture may be TCM's poster boy today, the Chinese physician in days of yore would have looked askance at it. Instead, his practice and prestige were based upon his grasp of the Chinese pharmacopoeia.
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Acupuncture was left to the shamans and blood letters. After all, it was grounded, not in the knowledge of which herbs were best for what conditions, but astrology.
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In Giovanni Maciocia's 2005 book, The Foundations Of Chinese Medicine: A Comprehensive Text For Acupuncturists And Herbalists, there is a chart showing the astrological provenance of acupuncture. The chart shows how the 12 main acupuncture meridians and the 12 main body segments correspond to the 12 Houses of the Chinese zodiac.
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In Chinese cosmology, all life is animated by a numinous force called qi, the flow of which mirrors the sun's apparent 'movement' during the year through the ecliptic. (The ecliptic is the imaginary plane of the earth's orbit around the sun).Moreover, everything in the Chinese zodiac is mirrored on Earth and in Man. This was taught even in the earliest systematised TCM text, the Yellow Emperor's Canon Of Medicine, thus: 'Heaven is covered with constellations, Earth with waterways, and man with channels.'This 'as above, so below' doctrine means that if there is qi flowing around in the imaginary closed loop of the zodiac, there is qi flowing correspondingly in the body's closed loop of imaginary meridians as well.
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Note that not only is acupuncture astrological in origin but also the astrology is based on a model of the universe which has the earth at its centre. This geocentric model was an erroneous idea widely accepted before the Copernican revolution.