Last night I had a great idea for a blog post, but it was too late in the night to start writing it.  Now I can’t remember for the life of me what I had wanted to say.  Must not have been that great of an idea after all.  I don’t really have any great ideas right now either, but I did stumble across an article at the NYT web site that distracted me through my lunch break (and probably half an hour beyond it).  Check it out at http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/studying-acupuncture-one-needle-prick-at-a-time/

At first is seems an innocuous article about attempts to study the medical efficacy of acupuncture treatments.  Then I got to this part:

“‘People argue that there really are no inactive acupuncture points — pretty much wherever you put a needle in the body is an active point,’ said Dr. Alex Moroz, a trained acupuncturist who directs the musculoskeletal rehabilitation program at New York University. ‘There is a body of literature that argues that the whole approach to studying acupuncture doesn’t lend itself to the Western reductionist scientific method.’”

Statements like these, reported with no critical analysis by the media, just drive me up the wall.  There are a great number of things wrong here, but it’s late so I’ll just pick out the biggest ones.

1. If there are no active points, if you can just stick the needles anywhere and get the same effect, then why on earth do we need “trained acupuncturists”?  Couldn’t you teach anyone to stick the needles in in about 2 hours, hand the person a license, and send them out to treat people on the cheap?  Maybe that’s what a trained acupuncturist is, I don’t know.

2. What on earth does the possibility of there being no active points have to do with acupuncture not lending itself to testing by the scientific method?  If every point is an active point, you should be able to test for that, it shouldn’t be hard at all.  Just have 2 groups receiving treatment for the same illness and give one “real” acupuncture with Qi and Meridians and all that, and give the other random sticks with needles (but administered in a similar fashion, so that the patients have a similar experience).  If both groups do equally well, then there are no active points.  Bam, scientific method.  That wasn’t hard.

3.  The “reductionist scientific method” is not “Western”.  They use it in Japan and China too.  And everywhere actually.  It is the most important method by which human understanding of the natural world advances.  Some would argue it is the only method.  To say something doesn’t lend itself to testing by the scientific method is to say it doesn’t lend itself to being proven.  If the scientific method cannot be applied to something then belief in that thing is a matter of faith, rather than reason.  Which is fine.  I am a Christian who believes all sorts of wacky things that cannot be proven.  But then, I don’t make claims that prayer can be proven to be an effective treatment of illness, beyond the fact that there is probably a placebo effect associated, depending on one’s tendency to believe in the power of prayer.  I certainly would never argue that my faith-based prayer therapy is an alternative form of medicine that focuses on the “whole person”.  Quite the contrary, faith-based medicine, like prayer and apparently acupuncture, can only treat the spiritual components of a person.  From a biological perspective, this means it can treat the mind.  And the mind is known to be able to do some remarkable healing in cases where actually bio-active materials are ineffective.  But then, that is the definition of a placebo.  There’s no shame in it.  Doctors have used the placebo effect to help alleviate suffering for as long as medicine has existed.

So if you feel your acupuncture is working, that’s great, keep doing it.  Just don’t spend a whole lot of money, and please, please don’t give me your bullshit about how the ancient Chinese philosophers had all this knowledge about the body that “western” science can’t possibly understand.  Cuz if you believe that, I can point you to some people who have lot of equally valid claims based on ancient knowledge about the creation of the earth taking 7 days (and it drives those self-righteous western scientist-types CRAZY!)

If you’re just that interested, a fairly bright, if possibly over-zealous doctor has posted a critique of the above article: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/08/tara_parker-pope_and_the_new_york_times.php.

Before signing off, I’ll just note that the above author’s frustration with people’s fondness for this placebo-based treatment is a bit over-wrought.  If something is a really good placebo, that’s worth knowing, and I think it’s worth studying to figure out what makes it so effective.  The placebo effect is powerful, and if we can harness it and use it to our advantage, it may have great benefits to patients, particularly those with chronic pain that is resistant to existing forms of treatment.