Eligibility was determined through screening interviews by research assistants involved in the study. Through June 2001 and April 2003, the investigators recruited men and women from the greater Boston and Cambridge areas through advertisements and referrals from health care professionals. This particular study came out of a collaboration between Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan School of Public health, and the Harvard School of Public Health and examined the effect of acupuncture on persistent arm pain due to repetitive stress injuires (RSIs). The paper, published in the most recent issue of the Clinical Journal of Pain joins a long line of papers that show that, when the study is well-designed and includes true sham acupuncture, the results virtually invariably show acupuncture to be useless as a therapy. This time around, I’ve come across yet another acupuncture study that serves to demonstrate that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo.
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From such a reading of the literature, it has become very obvious to me that (1) the vast majority of research into acupuncture is shoddy in the extreme, with methodological problems that greatly increase the probability of false positive trials (2) many investigators conflate electroacupuncture which is in reality nothing more than the “conventional” modality of transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation rebranded, with acupuncture itself (unless the ancient Chinese knew how to make electrical nerve stimulation devices, which I highly doubt) and (3) when trials are done with true sham acupuncture there is almost invariably no difference detected between the true acupuncture and the control group. The reason my opinion has changed and now I place acupuncture firmly in the “woo” category is that I’ve actually been reading the scientific literature on acupuncture over the last year or so. Sure, I may have dismissed homeopathy as the pure magical thinking that it was, but acupuncture I wasn’t so sure about. Certainly, I didn’t believe the whole rigamarole about needles somehow “restoring the flow of qi” or anything like that, but I did wonder if maybe there was some physiologic mechanism at work behind acupuncture that produced real benefits in terms of pain relief above that of placebo. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, given the sorts of posts I’ve done recently on acupuncture, but it’s true.
Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn’t consider acupuncture to be a form of woo.
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