re: #12 kreyagg

There are studies that show that placebos can be effective, even sometimes when the patient is aware that they are receiving sham treatment. I have yet to see a proponent of acupuncture produce a double blind study that shows that it performs any better than a similar placebo.

Oh please. Like Chico Marx said (I paraphrase) who am I going to believe, you or my own eyes?

You don’t think that many prescription medications have gone through double-blind studies, only later to be called placebos? How about the medical treatments that were considered standard in the 1960s, that today would be considered malpractice?

You want a test, here’s a test. Go to acupuncture. Pick an illness or symptom that is bothersome, and then go to acupuncture for a while, years. Then tell me whether or not you believe, or know, that Chi exists. There are plenty of findings supporting acupuncture, only they now call it ‘deep brain, tissue, whatever stimulation’. If you’d like, I’ll post each one that I come across. The real difference between the deep electrical stimulation and acupuncture is that the Chinese know a route from the surface into the deeper areas. That’s it.

Not only that, regarding the present studies, you don’t think bias enters into these studies? Here’s a story. I watched a show, Scientific American Frontiers or something, hosted by Alan Alda. They were showing us a study trying to isolate acupuncture from a placebo. To shorten this, the ‘real’ treatment was along the Heart Meridian. Then, according to the scientist, they picked a meridian that they felt was completely unrelated to the heart, far far away from the heart. And so they chose to place needles along the Small Intestine Meridian. Now, if you tell this story to people who know anything about acupuncture, this is hilarious. An unbelievable show of Western arrogance and incompetence.

To do a proper study, double-blind or not, the scientist has to do their homework. And right now, they don’t seem want to do that homework. Don’t lose sight of the ball here. We are not talking about needles, we are talking about Chi, the existence of Chi. That’s the question, and you can’t discover that with a double-blind study.