Talk:Acupuncture/Archive 1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Please note: this is an archive page. New content should be added at the active Talk:Acupuncture page.


Contents

Question That Has Still Not Been Answered!

  • Question:

What exactly is accupuncturing and how does it work and what good does poking needles in someones body do?

Still missing - what is it good for

The article has been rewritten but still has a major problem - nowhere does the article say what acupuncture is actually good for. For the sake of argument, let's all agree it works. Great! But work for or against what? Post-operative nausea? That's rather limited isn't it. Methinks balancing your Qi is a bit vague. Medications and medical procedures have indications and counter-indications, or when to use them and when NOT to use them. There seem to be plenty of people working on this article that think using the human body like a Voodoo doll is a valid medical procedure. Can't anyone of those people answer this simple question: what is acupuncture good for? What are it's indications and counterindications? Come on people, it's real and serious medicine, and every other form of medicine has these, so what are they for acupuncture. It can't be something like 'just try it when you feel sick and see what happens' - at least I hope not. Every 'Western' doctor can tell you what your prognosis is with his methods. Acupuncturists (if acupuncture is the real proven medicine they say it is) should be able to do the same. Let's see some of it (or do acupuncturist have no idea what they're doing?).

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? ;-)
In a more constructive vein, on http://www.itmonline.org/arts/acuintro.htm the last section, A FEW COMMONLY USED ACUPUNCTURE POINTS, gives a shopping list of ailments treatable using 14 different "points used repeatedly, because of their versatility". Since evrything turns up in the list except the kitchen sink, I don't know if it is useful in the article. I also don't know how representative it is. On http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/acu.html in the Dubious Claims section you can read, "The conditions claimed to respond to acupuncture include chronic pain (neck and back pain, migraine headaches), acute injury-related pain (strains, muscle and ligament tears), gastrointestinal problems (indigestion, ulcers, constipation, diarrhea), cardiovascular conditions (high and low blood pressure), genitourinary problems (menstrual irregularity, frigidity, impotence), muscle and nerve conditions (paralysis, deafness), and behavioral problems (overeating, drug dependence, smoking)." That is, for "believers", acupuncture is good for everything, for "skeptics" it is good for nothing. The only middle ground I see is for sympatheic skeptics it might be good for ailments like pain and nausea with a high psychological component. Can we write that in the article? Art Carlson 10:23, 2005 Feb 21 (UTC)

An Answer

The problem I see here is that Chinese medicine and acupuncture are not "good for something" or "against what", this is not how it is thought about. This is a western way to think about it! We acupuncturists look at it like this.

You have a person that is a system. You have the universe that is a second system. Both the person system and the universe system are ONE. So if there is a problem with one or the other then they both have a problem. Sickness in a person is from that person being out of balance so to fix the patient you need to bring them back into balance. There really is not something to be against. Chinese medicine is used to fix all problems IE bring the patient back into balance or really to not let them get out of balance in the first place. If your patient is sick then you have already failed! Even during the black plague some people stayed healthy. Why? Chinese medicine would say because they were very well balance and had gotten good jing qi (DNA) from their parents.

Chinese medicine is used to fix all problems. It has no limits. The same can be said for western medicine. We use it to tackle all problems from cancer to bipolar disorders to car crashes. This is not to say that Chinese medicine is the best choice for all problems but that during it's long history it might have been the best and only choice at the time. In thousands of years you are challenged by a lot of problems.

So the next question is what treatment works best for what problem. Learning the answer to that question has taken me four years of intense post graduate study and there is still much to learn. It is also still being researched using modern science. Unfortunately the experiments are often very poorly designed by hostel parties and run by lowly qualified acupuncturist, but that is off topic.

Trying to understand this medicine from outside the system is like trying to understand computer programming without believing in logic. Understand logic and programming is easy to learn. Understand qi, blood, fluid metabolism, five element, the organs and the system of changes that happen with it and you will understand what can be treated.

In short needles are used to fix problems with the qi flow (more yang problems) and their resulting issues. Herbs are used for more material (more yin) problems such as blood deficiencies like a lack of iron, vitamins or vital liquids. Tui na is used for setting bones and relaxing muscles. Of course there is much overlap and also other many other techniques to a system that is thousands of years old.

Another way to look at it is that a “sickness” has a root and it has leaves. The leaves are the symptoms. The root is what is causing it. For example a patient has a headache. The pain is a leaf. The root can be harder to find but for the example we will say it is tension. In Chinese medicine you will find that the source of the pain starts in the top of the shoulder half way between the neck and the top of the arm. This point is called Gall Bladder 21. The Gall Bladder is related to the thought of making decisions and is a yang organ. The yin organ that goes with it is the liver. It's sick emotion is anger. One way to look at it is that the person has a weak Gall Bladder and thus is not making decisions well. Thus their anger gets stuck and tension builds up within this yin yang subsystem. This system effects all other system because the person is a whole and the person and the universe are a whole. This sickness effects their environment, their partner and the car they smash thinking about the anger.

To fix this problem the doctor must get the energy to move. To do this a needles would be place in Gall Bladder 21 to fix the leaf. Also a needle might be placed in Liver 3 and Large Intestine 4 to move the energy of the liver. An herbal formula maybe given and tui na may be used to relax the muscles too. On top of all this the patient will be told not to do stressful activities and maybe to take a vacation as well as exercise. The avoidance of caffeine and alcohol is helpful as is getting a good nights sleep, avoiding stressful TV shows, meditation and healthy eating.

Acupuncture Article Needs Serious Attention

I’m quite taken aback by this so-called “encyclopedic” article. It is my understanding that an encyclopedia is a comprehensive body of knowledge, but from what I’ve read, this article is nothing but a few people trying to make sense of acupuncture and fear that it is only quackery. The impression I get is that the people writing this article, in general, do not know what they are talking about and need to be educated about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The only information that I found informing was the history, some of the theory, and the potential risks. There is absolutely no need for the sections “controversy as to effectiveness”, “purported benefits” or any links that do not educate people on the theory of acupuncture. In other words there should not be anything biased in the article that leads a person to choose for or against acupuncture. And by all means, the article itself should not be used as a means to debate the effectiveness of acupuncture. (Hence the need to remove the sections, “controversy as to effectiveness” and “purported benefits” as well as removing any non-informative links

Thank you for your comments, but on this one point I totally disagree. When I read an encyclopedia article, I don't want to only hear what the subject says about itself. I want to know the source of the knowledge and how it fits into the rest of human knowledge, and in particular what science can say about it, if anything at all. There may be many ways to improve the article, but a discussion of the “controversy as to effectiveness” must be included in some form somewhere in Wikipedia. Art Carlson 09:11, 2005 Jan 24 (UTC)

Instead of using “purported benefits”, I recommend using “Benefits: According to TCM” and using only TCM, or other forms of Acupuncture theory, rather than trying to legitimize or incriminate acupuncture.

Currently, I am in my first year of studies at the Canadian College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine CCAOM in Victoria, BC, Canada and for those that wonder about specific information on the effectiveness or what it is good for, all I can tell you is that I need to study for four more years to know. I can, however, tell you that I have seen treatments work for facial paralysis, arthritis, various joint injuries, sciatica, herpes zoster and tinea versicolor.

Acupuncture is good for: heart rhythm, pain from sciatica, stiff necks, lung congestion, sinusitis, upset stomach, bleeding nose, depression, insomnia (those are all the conditions that it has helped me with)
  • Well, if anyone in this college of yours can show any of these cures or effects is real, I feel a Nobel Prize for medicin coming! Did any of these cures make it into some real medical journals? I've got access to about all of them, so please tell me which one and which issue so I can look it up. FYI, herpes zoster is an asymptomatic disease, meaning you be infected without showing any symptoms. Then it comes and goes, on its own. You have simply seen the normal diseaseprocess as it would have been without any treatment whatsoever. I have my suspicions that goes for the other examples you mentioned as well.
    • I don't mean to butt in here, but if you're interested in reading some articles that have made it to "real" medical journals, I'm surprised you haven't found any yet. I suggest that if you have access to an online database such as PubMed or Academic Search Premier that a search on the term "Acupuncture" will yield a very large number of results (over 18,000 articles on Academic Search Premier 12th Jan 2006). Only if you're interested that is.... Piekarnia 08:43, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

In British Columbia, acupuncture and TCM is regulated and governed by the CTCMA and there are specific licensing requirements. In order for me to be a Doctor of TCM, I need to two years of prerequisites, and five years of study; I also need to have the core competencies that are listed by the CTCMA and pass the licensing exams. Not all places have set regulations for the practice of acupuncture, so it is best to make sure the acupuncturist you see is qualified. It is also important not to judge acupuncture or TCM itself based on a treatment you receive from someone that is not competent.

  • You can regulate, license and qualify all you want, it doesn't change the fact that something does or doesn't work! That is something most people who are into alternative medicin miss completely. You can study something worthless for years, and it will remain worthless.

To answer the question about Qi: I actually wanted to study herbology and not acupuncture because I knew nothing about acupuncture, but after I received an acupuncture treatment, I experienced what is called “de qi” (a very difficult to describe sensation). Then I wanted to study acupuncture. I had not studied many meridians at all and I actually told the intern the exact pathway of a meridian I did not know. It felt like a wire moving inside my body and it was very pleasant. So now, I believe that the term “qi” is a name for a sensation that the Chinese played with and documented the results of what happened. Since western medicine has not explored this sensation, I think there is no proper translation and therefore, it seems like bogus.

Wow, so you felt the sensation... I can strongly recommend watching Penn and Tellers 'Bullshit'. In season one they have a lady who can just feel the energy flow all through her when they wave a magnet over her arm - a magnet that they demagnitized before taping!! She feels even more when they wave a huge magnet over her, made from aluminum raingutter. Do not underestimate the power of The Force, err, I mean, suggestion. They do a lot more to various people that seems to ridiculous to be true, but plenty of them feel all kinds of great and wonderful things. The power of suggestion is an explanation of what you felt without the need for Qi and meridians, things that no scientist has ever seen. And the power of suggestion can be experimentally repeated by anyone. Check the scientific method and Occam's razor and you might understand why Qi and meridians are not the scientific explanation for the sensation you (and that lady) felt. Oh, and Western medicine has explored that sensation and came up with, guess what, the power of suggestion as explanation and then moved on to real and more promising things. While you and other acupuncturists where out in Woowooland, they developed a number of new organtransplant-techniques, new keyhole operation methods, new treatments for AIDS, new anti-cancermedicin, new ways of fighting resistant germs and so on. All this in maybe just the last 5 years. I do pray, tell me, what has acupuncture achieved in that time? Or the last 500 or 1.000 years for that matter? (besides finding ever more places to safely stick needles into).

As for the question about when to see an acupuncturist, [edit: I ask myself if I] can wait to see a doctor. If I am losing a lot of blood, I might die shortly. Therefore, I can’t afford to book an appointment sometime later in the week to see a doctor of TCM. That would be silly. Instead, I would go to the emergency room. Now, if I knew I had a condition that could wait a while or I hear the phrase, “let’s wait and see if it goes away on its own” or, “there is no cure” or my personal favorite, “would you like some pain killers?” then I would definitely see a doctor of TCM.

  • Whoa, wait a minute here! Ask yourself: Can I wait to see a doctor???? That's about the dumbest and most dangerous advice I've heard in years. One of the major dangers of quackery is that it keeps people away from effective medicin until it is too late. You are giving advice that effectively has that result. People without medical qualifications should not try and make a diagnosis, not on themselves or anyone else. They simply do not have sufficient knowledge. There are many things where you're not losing blood (like shock, which does not have any severe symptoms, or meningitis, that looks like flu) that'll kill you pretty quickly none the less. How about warningsigns of a cardiac arrest? No bloodloss. Without proper diagnosis, you can't tell if it can wait or not. Don't they teach you that sort of thing in TCM school? I guess not.
    • Yes, they do teach this stuff at my school, and you are right, I should not have told people to ask themselves if they can wait to see a doctor. That was wrong of me. I must also strongly emphasize that I am only in my first year of studies and I DO NOT know a whole heck of a lot right now. I need more schooling. Besides which, it is illegal for me to give any advice because I am not licensed. So, it is not advice. It is my own personal experience and my own views toward health.

For a really good introduction to TCM read “The Web that has No Weaver” by Ted J. Kaptchuk OMD.

And for a standard textbook about acupuncture read “A Manual of Acupuncture" by Peter Deadman, et al.

For some good websites online, try http://www.sacredlotus.com (was internalhealers.com) , http://tcm.health-info.org/index.htm , and http://www.acuxo.com/index.asp

Well, I took your advice and visited the websites. I'm not going to be accused of having an opinion without having looked up the relevant information. Just two gems I picked up from tcm.health, under diagnosis:
1) falling hair: in TCM, that apparently means blood deficiency. I'd think of things like side-effects of chemotherapy, hormonal problems, poisenous substances etc. but no, it's all simple blood deficiency. What that means in TCM, I haven't been able to find out from the site yet, but I suppose a transfusion with a few pints of blood will do the trick. After all, transfusions do involve needles!
2) Diagnosis by taking someones pulse by palpatation. That was a revelation, an epiphany! I'll never look at an ICU the same way again. I thought all those state-of-the-art machines, monitoring every detail of the patients circulation gave all the info one could ever need. Now I see it as a complete waste of money, since all I have to do is feel the pulse by hand and I know all about them! Seems I can even feel the kidney position. Silly me, I thought my anatomyclasses taught me where the position of the kidneys was. Apparently I've been lied to, and I need to feel the pulse to find out where in the body they're hiding.
(I do hope you can recognize sarcasm when you see it). I don't think I'll check out those sites any further, because the few hours I've spent reading them where a total an utter waste of my time, and I do have a life. If that is the best TCM can present for itself, it's not just a load of bullocks, but utterly pathetic as well. I simply can not fathom how anyone with the slightest knowledge of medicin can take any of it serious. Or anyone with a functioning brain to tell you the truth. I'm not sorry if I sound asinine, rude or whatever, since TCM (as one can see on the mentioned sites) is so obviously a load of crock that being polite and trying to discuss it seriously is pointless.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the TCM definitions of things like "Blood" (xue) and "Kidneys" (shen) aren't intended to function as equivalents of the anatomical organs or tissues with the same names (which is why the TCM terms are capitalized: no acupuncturist would argue otherwise). But thanks for pointing that out anyway; there's always someone around who just has to bayonet a straw man, and aim for the lowest common denominator in discourse just to score a sound bite.
The value of TCM theory, to the extent that it is valuable, lies in its ability to guide treatment (as the NIH consensus statement notes; see my comments under the Pseudoscience section). TCM theory predicted the efficacy of LI 4 at treating orofacial pain [1], and of moxa at UB 67 in turning a fetus from the breach position [2]. Could biomedicine have predicted these things? No, which is why it's good that people continue to study TCM theory; there is stuff of value there. It represents the accumulated knowledge of some very smart people from an earlier era, encoding their knowledge according to their prescientific cultural paradigm. This point recollects stories of healers of yore rubbing a piece of moldy bread on a wound to speed healing (the mold, of course, contained penicillin-like antibiotics).
Sorry if all this is too nuanced for the knee-jerk. politically-motivated, anti-CAM skeptical types, but I've found that most open-minded people don't have much difficulty understanding the point I'm making here. (P.S., please sign your posts out of consideration for readers.) -Jim Butler 03:42, 15 February 2006 (UTC)


I hope this helps and I seriously hope to see a complete revamp of this article so that the article can deserve to be in an encyclopedia. As for me rewriting the article, I would, but right now I’m only learning the locations of the acupoints and I'm too busy studying to for upcoming tests. However, I may just add a few things once the semester is over, or when I just want a break from studying.

  • Years of your life for studying acupuncture and you do not seem interested in information about its effifacy? Wouldn't you just hate it if you read an article on Wikipedia about acupuncture and think 'hey that's great, I'm going to be an acupuncturist' only to find out after wasting years of your life that it's complete nonsense? I'm not saying it is, but information that acupuncture is controversial to say the least should really be included. It is a fact, and facts should be in encyclopedias.
    • Thanks for bringing all this stuff up; it is good to get people thinking critically. However, I must say that Chinese thought is completely different from western thought and it is pointless for me to adequately argue against your comments now because I need to focus on passing exams and learning. I hope that by the time I graduate I may know enough to write a book on the subject and argue in favour (or against) TCM, depending on my experiences. I am, after all, only in my first year. Here is a brief example of how difficult it is to try to explain how TCM theory works (or doesn’t): The word Blood in TCM is not the same as blood in western medicine, just as vomit is not called vomit in TCM, but "rebellious qi of the stomach" or the literal translation of headache is "wind in the head". Besides which, there is more than one direction to the path of knowledge. There is induction vs. deduction, for example. Try proving, using the "scientific method", that body is not is not separate from the mind (Descartes), or whether it is possible to know anything (epistemology) and you'll get a minor glimpse at what it is like trying to explain TCM. Moreover, I am very much interested in doing research once I graduate.
        • FYI, there is scientific proof the body and the mind are not separated. In some patients with severe epilepsy, the connection between the 2 halves of the brain is surgically severed. After the operation, patients at first have a hard time functioning because both halves of the brain function independently, they take independent decisions and each try to control the body. Only after a while, they become aware of eachother and people will function fairly normal again. If the mind were separate from the physical body (and thus the brain), this should not happen. Severe changes in personality and behaviour due to certain braindamage (stroke and trauma) also show that the mind is a pure biological function. The idea of a mind or soul separate from the physical body is a matter of faith, since there is no proof for it, and all the more against it. You're of course free to believe in it, but please don't call it science.
      • The claim that Chinese thinking is sooo different and that Western science therefor can not judge is complete bull. FYI, there is such a thing as 'absolute truth'. 5+5 = 10, wether by 'Chinese' or 'Western' thinking. Anyone who says different has a serious problem and needs professional psychiatric help. Whatever name TCM gives to things like a headache or vomit does not change the validity of the claims that TCM makes, or their testability. English just seems to me more economical in expressing the subject. And TCM fails the tests, specifically the underlying concepts of Qi and meridians. The TMC folks themselves can not even prove their claims, once experiments are properly blinded. And TCM practioners are just as susceptible to all the psychological mechanisms that can fool people as anyone. Also, claims like 'I know Qi exists because I can manipulate it with TCM and I know TCM works because I can manipulate Qi with it' are circular and fallacious reasoning by any method of thinking. And why would anyone in China use 'Western' medicine at all if TCM is so fantastic? People in countries with all these fantastic forms of non-Western medicine are always screaming for Western medicine if they have a problem - just look at what kind of medicine the countries that have been hit by the Tsunami are literally begging for, no Ayurvedic, TCM or whatever alternative medicine, they only want the stuff that works.
      • Absolute truth?? 5+5=10?? Are you sure?? I think that 5+5=A. Or it could be that 5+5=12. All this is true. One is base 10, one is base 16 and one is base 8. Truth is only truth if we agree on what we are talking about and how to look at it. So do I need help? Or are you just attacking a system that you refuses to or are unable to understand?

Why do you believe that water is made of subatomic particles? Is it because you know this to be true or because someone showed them to you or because some of the smartest people in the world told you it is true or do you believe in them without ever seeing the truth yourself because you were told by your father when you were 10? Most of a persons reality is belief. Are you sure that it is really partciles? Do you have what it takes to prove it to me? Can you win a fight about this with me? Do you have the math? I think it is waves myself.  :-)

I have never read a science article that was written with a view point that was from outside of science. Why should Chinese medicine have to be view from sciences point of view to be valid? It is well known that science tends to reject, laugh about and ridicule its own ideas before they become excepted by the mainstream. This acceptance often only happens after the old guard dies out. Much of this whole page is a showcase of the war between old guard western medicine and the incoming foreign view point. It is filled with emotion and demands for proof in the emotionally comfortable view point. Not much here is unbiased , fair, scholarly or anything but an attack from the skeptical western majority.

Also western medicine is not totally scientific and unbiased. It is controlled and researched by big business at the expense of the end users and tax payers. The drug companies are not so different from the cigarette companies of the past. Profit is the goal not universal health and happiness.

I once went to a talk on a new source of bioavailable calcium for patients to take. I asked about the bioavailability of calcium in seaweed or almonds or milk in comparison to the new pill and was told that the research for most food products had not been done because the people paying for the research saw no profit in it.

This is not to say that all doctors are greed monsters or that they do not want to help their patients. It is just that they do what is traditional, conservative or backed by big companies. If doctor did what was best for their patient at all times and always used science then why do USA hospitals have such poor food? Food is one of the basics of health. Doctor to what is traditional and safe from laws suits and peer attack.

"I have never read a science article that was written with a view point that was from outside of science. Why should Chinese medicine have to be view from sciences point of view to be valid?"
Because science is just a word for "looking for truth while taking care to make as few mistakes as possible". Science is not just one of many viewpoints, it's the systematic method for searching for the truth. Working within a group and ignoring what other people think is a pretty safe way to draw wrong conclusions. That is what you are trying to do.
"Why do you believe that water is made of subatomic particles? Is it because you know this to be true or because someone showed them to you or because some of the smartest people in the world told you it is true or do you believe in them without ever seeing the truth yourself because you were told by your father when you were 10?"
I know it because I used electrolysis to split water in its parts and the hydrogen volume was exactly twice the oxygen volume, because I know how to compute the orbitals of hydrogen, because I saw the hydrogen spectrum which agrees exactly with the computation, because I understand why the chemistry of oxygen and hydrogen is as it is, because I understand hydrogen bonds and the effects they have, because I understand why ice is lighter than water and builds crystals in the form it does, etc. You see, science is not just words - it has a lot of background.
Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is just a mockup consisting of empty words. You folk talk about "meridians" but you never saw one under the microscope or can explain how it works or what it consists of. And you can't show empirically that needling a meridian is better than needling anything else. To the contrary, it has been shown many times now that the point where you needle is not important. You had lots of time, and there were lots of studies, but they failed.
Sorry, but all your arguments are just smokescreens and red herrings. --Hob Gadling 13:47, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
      • While all these useless discussions continue about whether or not acupuncture works, whether or not all acupuncturists are evil and should be lynched/hanged etc. the rest of the world has been busy. A preliminary study conducted by researchers in China has found that one possible physiological explanation of the meridian is the perivascular space. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Volume 9, Number 6, 2003. pp851-859. Certainly not conclusive, but it's a start in the right direction. Definitely more productive than preaching from a soapbox, without researching the facts first. Come on people, show some intelligence.Piekarnia 08:43, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I can explain what a meridian is and show directly how it works. I'm not an acupuncturist, but use of meridians is a demonstrable technique that I've learned in the context of martial arts. Not to mince words, I can knock someone on their butt thereby, very convincing! I have demonstrated it to the satisfaction of several sceptical scientists, to the point that I now lecture annually on the ethics of tradiutional Chinese medicine to fourth year Western medical students (externs) at a local Medical School. You just haven't had a competent practitioner demonstrate the system to you. If you'll look at our pseudoscience article, you'll see that one of the definitions of such is pretending to scientific validity. Chinese medicine (except for some modern New Age charlatans) doesn't do that. Science can measure the effects of TCM, but TCM was not formulated on scientific principles. Scientific principles didn't exist systematically in any culture anywhere in the world when TCM was being developed. --Fire Star 22:50, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
(I don't know if you are identical to the anonymous user above. I'll assume that you are not, since your points are a lot more sensible.) So you can "knock someone on their butt" by kicking (or whatever) in his acupunture points. Did you try if it works just as well with a point 10cm beside it? (I don't mean: once. I mean: double blind. Tell newbie fighters that the acupuncture points are here, tell others that they are there. Let someone check if there is a difference between the two groups. This has probably never been done, and it will probably never be done, but I hoope this makes it a bit clearer that your "I have demonstrated" argument does not hold water for anyone who knows what sources of error lurk in the human mind.) That's one of the problems with quackeries like acupuncture: they just look at some data, they just want to confirm and are not interested in refutation. I guess "a competent practitioner demonstrating the system" will not be able to convince me. But you may be right that acupuncture does not claim to be science. --Hob Gadling 09:34, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
It seems clear from the sampling of results cited in the article that the studies cited in the article have neither proved nor disproved the efficacy of accupuncture. I'm not sure where the conclusion that accupuncture doesn't work comes from, it is not supported by the evidence that has been provided. Perhaps this article should be renamed - the quality to date of acupuncture experiments. Most MDs are not primarily scientists, their interest is in helping people. I think the same can be said of most acupuncturists. If in the worst case scenario, acupuncture is no better than the placebo effect, it would still be better (in many instances) than the best treatment available from an MD. At least there aren't significant side effects. --By L.M. PhD. [12/18/2005]
I think that rather than renaming the article we should look carefully at the issue of what an article should be. We should not be criticizing what we do not understand. If the critique of a therapy goes beyond something like "generally regarded as effective and safe" or "generally viewed as outmoded and potentially harmful," then the critique should go into a separate article. The article on accupuncture should not suggest that people prefer this treatment modality, nor should it argue that they avoid this treatment modality. What it should do is to summarize the main points, especially the main theoretical points from which other points can be derived, that are present in standard medical texts on accupuncture used in China, Taiwan, etc. P0M 20:10, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Request for specific info

While there is a lot about wether acupuncture works or not, there is not much on what it's actually (supposed) to do. I'd like to see more on what specifically it's (supposed to be) good for. I myself have no idea after reading this article. It is said to do things to my Chi, but what would that actually do for me? I'd like to know what ailments acupuncturists claim to be able to treat and what not. For example, I don't think acupuncture (if it works at all) could ever treat a cavity in my teeth. I can however imagine it could work for teeth that are oversensitive to heat or cold. A clear sign of quackery is that one particular cure or method can treat anything from cancer to acne and hemerroids, like the good old snakeoil. Since according to the practioners acupuncture is not quackery, there must be things that acupuncture can and can not do. I'd like to see some specifics of that included in the article. Who can help? And how about a bit more info on the origins, such as some of the theory behind it from The Canon of the Yellow Emperor, the basis of most TCM practices.

Good idea. There should be some info about the scope of acupuncture in the article.
This is very much needed. There is a lot in this article about wether it works or not, but that is very much related to what acupuncture is (supposed to be) usefull for. Insulin works, but only if you're a diabetic. It doesn't do much good for you if used to treat, say, a stomach ulcer. Penicillin works too, but not against viral infections, only bacterial. So what is the indication for the use of acupuncture? There must be some acupuncturists who know what they're doing. But then again, maybe not.
It's easy to say what insulin and penicillin are good for because (a) they have been tested in scientific studies for various ailments, and (b) we understand a good deal about how they work. With acupuncture, the scientific status of both the clinical studies and the theories is highly questionable, which makes it very difficult to identify a consensus. If rigorous science is not backing up experience and ideas, how do you decide who to listen to? Art Carlson 12:19, 2005 Jan 18 (UTC)

Many good articles regarding acupuncture efficacy are listed on the World Health Organization's site: http://www.who.int/medicines/library/trm/acupuncture/acupuncture_trials.pdf is one. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2003/9241545437.pdf is another. In this second link Chapter 3 is particularly useful.

Various

Just wanted to clarify. The edit by 209.178.189.56 on Dec. 18 was me -- I guess I wasn't logged in. -- [User:Bcrowell]

Supporters of acupuncture claim that it works on animals, which are not influenced by placebos. Could somebody mention this? -- Error

  • ah, but the result is interpreted by humans, with all the associated problems such as confirmation bias.

This page required major editing, apparently was written by someone with an ax to grind against acupuncture, but little depth of knowledge. It was riddled with errors and omissions, starting with the first sentence referring to acupuncture as a "surgical" procedure. Also, it made no reference to any literature within the past decade (such as the NIH consensus statement). I retained the NCAHF excerpts in the interest of healthy skepticism. Yes, most research on the physiology of acupuncture has been performed on animals. I admit to bias, being a practitioner and student of the medical art of acupuncture for 18 years; also I am an MIT graduate and am no more fond of exaggerated claims or fuzzy thinking by my colleagues re acupuncture than is the NCAHF.[user:barrylevine]

When I asked my father, a respected doctor with 25+ years experience, about his opinion on acupuncture, he said 'of course it works, and it isn't just opiates either'. He is a firm believer in the energy field, and claims to sense it himself, actually. In fact, hundreds of doctors apparently sense this energy field, along with vortices which correspond curiously with the chakras... To deny the possibility of such an energy field is only closed-mindedness... It sickens me how much the religion of science has taken hold of social opinion. Any real scientist recognises science for what it is--a tool, rather than a dogma. People who go about calling others 'psuedoscientists' are actually, ironically, the epitome of psuedoscientists themselves, in having directly conflicted with the essential nature of science as both a tool and an artform which includes no absolute certainty, but only theory. It is more aligned with Tao than with dogma, it seems. Khranus

  • Let your father show James Randi or CSICOP that he can sense that energy field, take a million dollars and probably a Nobel Prize to boot. I'm afraid he wouldn't recognize energy if he got hit on the head by it. Science has investigated (using science as a tool) the energy field, found absolutely nothing and moved on to more useful things. And 'only theory'? You should look up what 'theory' means in a scientific context before using it like you do.
  • Ironically? Only theory? You seem to not understand the meaning of theory and irony... [3]

This thing is like the art of drawing blood. Some doctors could poke holes in their patient's arm for hours until a more experienced nurse takes over. The difference is that the bruises on the arm is a visual indication that if the poke is successful or not. Acupuncture does not show immediate feedback. A researcher may be spending years poking at the wrong spots and draw a wrong conclusion about the effectiveness of acupuncture. It is like proving no one could fly by asking a child to build an airplane. 12.234.73.11 08:26, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/293/17/2118

This article is typical of acupuncture research. At first read you would think that acupuncture is worthless but lets look a bit closer.

First assumption in this research is that a migraine is a condition treated by acupuncture. This is not true. If you look through 2000 years of acupuncture literature you will not see the word or the translation of the word migraine. Acupuncture would have many diagnosis for all these patient not one and thus many ways of treating the patients. A TCM acupuncturist would also be looking at diet, stress, sleep, and other forms of treatment like herbs after doing an hour long interview to learn the true cause of the problem. As my teachers always say, “bad diagnosis, bad treatment!”

German acupuncture. We tend to think of Germany as being leaders in alternative medicine but they have no real acupuncturists. (Not to say that some don't go to good schools outside of Germany.) In Germany you must be an allopathic doctor or a naturopathic doctor to practice acupuncture.

I was told that all I had to do was pass their naturopathic test to do Chinese medicine in Germany. The test is all allopathic medical questions to make sure that naturopaths now how to spot patients that need a referal to an MD.

Both allopathic doctor and naturopathic doctor then take a few weekends of courses to be able to practice acupuncture, not that the law requires this. They do not need to take any other tests to prove that they know what they are doing. Would you get surgery from an allopathic doctor that was really an acupuncturist with a few weekends of training in surgery? Would you expect him to prove that surgery works by doing “real” surgery and fake surgery or no surgery? In contrast my training at Bastyr University took 4 years including summers of 20+ credit a quarter of classes. In some places in the USA MD's can also get away with this incompetence of little training. Learn the quality of your acupuncturist. Believe science when it is done well but also learn to see poor science for what it is!

[This is for humor and for us to be glad that we are not doing this online encyclopedia like the H2G2 of BBC is doing, for example allowing such an article on acupuncture to appear in its collection and still present.]

Acupuncture (from H2G2 of the BBC) Created: 10th May 1999 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/U37243

A pseudo medical procedure whereby ill people stab themselves repeatedly with a large number of long thin metal needles, or worse, ay someone else to stab them. Originally a Chinese invention, believe it or not this has spread around the world with incredible popularity. Ill people not only pay money to be tortured in this way, they are quite prepared to make apointments weeks in advance and look forward to the procedure with something approximating eagerness. Adherents of acupuncture can be easily recognised by their startling resemblance to a stainless steel porcupine.(NB it is vitally imortant to remember when greeting patients of acupuncture NOT to grip them in a big friendly hug- for obvious reasons).

Pachomius2000 07:40, 18 February 2006 (UTC)Pachomius2000

re External links sec'n

PubMed

The following link

  • PubMed - US National Library of Medicine search engine with hundreds of scientific article on acupuncture is imperfect in that the site offers no URL that produces the effect of keying in the word "acupuncture". That is certainly no excuse for removing it, but if one of our programming or searching gurus could come up with a means of single click access, it would be a significant improvement. --Jerzy 17:58, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)
Okidoki. -- Kimiko 19:17, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Su Jok

On the other hand, the Su Jok link & graph added by IP 202.63.171.4 leading to e.g. a first sentence

Su Jok TM acupuncture stands as one of the aspects of the ONNURI TM medicine founded by Professor PARK JAE WOO, a scholar from South Korea are an adv, and i have removed them. --Jerzy 17:58, 2004 Feb 19 (UTC)

Photo

I could put my photo (currently linked) here, but with the drawing and the infobox, it seems like a bit much. Thoughts? heidimo 02:09, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Something weird

I've edited out a pretty blatant and rather clumsy POV paragraph and somehow the Wikipedia managed to remove any access to the previous version which included it dated 4 July, 2004. I've had some problems before with the Wikipedia not registering edits, but this is the first time that this has happened. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the contributor whom I reverted. If it does somehow return to us, and if such a thing belongs anywhere, it should be cleaned up and posted at Qi. Fire Star 04:48, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

  • Well, today it has reappeared, very good. I thought for a minute that I had magically developed sysop powers! I can see that the bit does have some relevance to the article - it is an attack on acupuncture's underlying theory - but is so insulting that it can't stand as it was written. Scepticism about qi is quite real and noteworthy, but it shouldn't be given the dismissive finality of the bit that I edited out. Fire Star 14:55, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This article is bad. Is this neutral: "For the skeptic, this is proof enough...". How about something more in the line of: those who are familiar with the effect of placebo (and when it's more likely to be found) and the difficulties doing a double blind study of something like ac. most often come to the conclusion that ac. is a pseudoscience.

English is not my first language but could someone not currently taking homeophatic medicine, dancing in circles hoping for rain, change this please.

Best regards / closet scientist practising ac. on a daily basis for personal gains

Dear 195.198.190.70, I agree, and have edited the offending section. Fire Star 22:47, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Criticisms

Okay, I have been reading this article, and it is in no way, shape or form a NPOV article. I am quite sceptical about acupuncture, and nothing about my reasons for scepticism is reflected in the article. I will do some research to find some sources but I want to question several things:

  • The Otzi story: the only reference I could find says that the tattoos are on the actual painful joints, not the acupuncture spots! References please! I will remove it from the introduction, and either remove it or put it in a less prominent place with some disclaimers.
  • The NIH declaration: this has been heavily criticised. I will add some of the criticisms of this declararation to the article
  • The line Acupuncture has eluded scientific explanation to some degree. seems to me far too weak. It has eluded scientific explanation to any degree, and many believe there is nothing there to explain! The only evidence are statistical studies.

Anybody got any problems with this? --Frank.visser 15:13, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The line Acupuncture has eluded scientific explanation to some degree. seems to me far too weak.
From what I've read, acupuncture is at least sometwhat effective (i.e., better than a placebo), and the mechanism is well understood scientifically: it's the principle of counter-irritation, which is that one source of irritation distracts the patient from another. The stuff about qi energy is of course nonsense, and I believe there is also evidence against the traditional beliefs about where to apply the needles for various complaints. One criticism I've seen of acupuncture is that the use of needles is an unnecessarily invasive technique; the same thing could be accomplished with any other type of irritation, e.g., rubbing with sandpaper. What I really hate about the article as it stands is that it is clearly written from the point of view of true believers in acupuncture, and it blithely mixes real science with pseudoscientific nonsense.
Support. From my firsthand experience with accupuncture, the counter irritation really works quite well, but I've found that it works equally well using fingernails or other noninvasive techniques, as the German study in the article has shown. Still, it does not invalidate accupuncture as a valid treatment. --Autrijus 05:01, 2004 Aug 18 (UTC)
  • It's the old 'if you hit someone on the thumb with a hammer, he'll forget about his headache for a while'. No chi, no meridians, no energy. Works just fine!

The "Protoscience" tag

User:Tim Starling has reverted 65.30.121.64's change of adding "protoscience" tag, citing that it is "not new, not under development". However, scientific study of accupuncture and qi theory is active in Chinese, Taiwan and especially Japan academic fields (cf. Academia Sinica researcher Wang Wei Gong's journal articles and projects in http://www.phys.sinica.edu.tw/~publication/html/ongoing_projects28.htm and his book, 'the symphony of qi' ISBN 986-7975-50-2). Also, it may be considered "new", as in "newly subjected to scientific investigation". Based on above reasons, I think it warrants the protoscience tag. I'll wait for reasonable consensus before adding the tag back. Autrijus 04:50, 2004 Aug 18 (UTC)

Accupuncture as praticed in not a protoscience. Praticioners a pretty much able to dd what they like and do not have to show scientific evidence for any of thier practices in order to be able to do themgeni14:17, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Considering "Category:Protoscience", I think your description also fits the popular practice of Alchemy, Biorhythm, Chiropractic medicine, Cryptzoology, Gaia philosophy, Meme and Parapsycology. IMHO, the fact that most practicioners don't cite relevant research should not count against a developing protoscience. Autrijus 14:26, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)
Alchemy partly lead to chemistry and towards the end it was becoming vagly scientific. Biorhythm shouldn't be there. There are a few prationers of Chiropractic medicine who do praticve it acording to scientific principles (becoming more common in europe). Can a catogry be listed on vfd?Geni 10:12, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Two Taipei CAM clinics I've been to (漢醫苑 and 古道堂) are operated by CAM researchers actively publishing papers, especially on pulse-measuring machines and counter-irritation treatments (eg. http://jbsc.nhri.org.tw/abs_search2.php?reg_no=1135&abs_no=1135 is authored by 漢醫苑's Y.C. Kuo, in collaboration with Dr .Wang). Since it is required in Taiwan for CAM doctors to also have degrees in western medicine, I think the situation is comparable to the European situation you described on Chiropractic medicines. Would you agree? Autrijus 14:26, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)
Your link is broken. there are many areas of alt med that try and get them sleves a vinear of respetibilty by having thier own journals. Got anything beyond low level pain relife published in mainstream journals (pref in english)?Geni 21:10, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)
If there are any scientific theories (scientific method, falsificationism) or positive results of clinical trials (double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized controlled trials) related to acupuncture or the existence of qi, it would be certainly important to quote in the article, next to references to studies by National Council Against Health Fraud and University of Heidelberg. The host jbsc.nhri.org.tw doesn?t seem do exist, though. Rafał Pocztarski 22:22, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)


Yikes. That page is still in Google cache, though. Here are some quick links I've found from a bit of googling in IEEE med and bio journals:
* [Pressure wave propagation in arteries] -- the basis of Wang's meridian and qi theory; for some of Wang's other papers, see http://www.ee.ntu.edu.tw/www/publications/backup/wk-wang and the sinica page above.
* [Electrical properties of meridians]
* [The science of acupuncture-theory and practice]
* [Applying quantum interference to EDST medicine testing]
* [Clinical applications of the EDST]
--Autrijus 03:59, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)
You should probably add references to those papers to the article if you find them appropriate and on-topic, however judging from their abstracts they focus on trying to explain phenomena which don?t seem to have been demonstrated in any double-blind clinical trial, using hypotheses and devices often considered pseudoscientific at best and fraudulent at worst, so don?t be surprised if you later have to argue with anyone who questions their assumptions, relation to scientific method, or relevance—e.g. before referencing a paper on “applying quantum interference to EDST (electrodermal screening test) medicine testing” you should read on “electrodermal screening” in Quack “Electrodiagnostic” Devices article on Quackwatch by Stephen Barrett, M.D., a vice-president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, for that article and the references therein contain very important examples of the arguments you will subsequently have to refute. Rafał Pocztarski 14:30, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I'm aware that EDST medicine is highly controvertial, and the experiments in Wang's pressure wave propagation theory are mostly only known in China, Japan and Taiwan. As I'm not a researcher in this field, I'll contend myself in adding the first two references to the article. Autrijus 17:04, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

I do appreciate the constructive discussion here. :-) Since a consensus is not reached, I'll refrain from adding the protoscience tag on this article, although I'd like to point out the inconsistency withthe article Protoscience, which lists acupuncture among lucid dreaming as protosciences before this discussion begins. Also, other articles currently listed in the protoscience category does not seem to be subjected to a consistent standard. Autrijus 17:04, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

I wouldn?t exactly call acupuncture new, nor does it follow scientific method, so I am not sure why do you call it protoscience. You have posted links to papers which cost $35.00 each to read. It would probably make more sense to reference only publicly available texts so the External links section would contain only things which can actually be directly linked to.
From the abstract it is not clear what the “model with radial dilatation for simulating the behavior of a real artery” has to do with acupuncture:
Abstract: The authors solve the equation of pressure wave propagation in an artery with radial dilatation to give an analytic solution of wave propagation in an elastic vessel for more generalized conditions. This will serve as a complementary solution to work that is based on the assumption that the radial dilatation of the arterial wall is small. The authors' solution is important for physiological studies because it simulates the behavior of a real artery. To confirm the authors' analytic solution, experiments were performed in tubes with different elastic constants
Also, while the second paper might not have any reference to “electrodermal screening” in the title itself, it has several such references in the abstract alone:
[...] The EDST is also based on ancient practices and is safer and more holistic, versatile, and cost effective. The device is elegantly simple and not extremely expensive. Hopefully, it will help free medical progress from its dependence on ever more expensive and specialized medical instrumentation. This alone would have a profound effect on health care cost and accessibility. The quality of health care will also improve with integration of the EDST into modern medical practice. Because the EDST makes use of the body's meridian system, it can map and help analyze the body's own signals, making it particularly useful in early diagnosis. With its solid theoretical foundation in modern physics and quantum mechanics, it is perhaps the most "modern" medical methodology available today.
You have to realise that you do not help acupuncture at all by connecting it to quackery.[4] [5] [6] [7] If you are arguing against acupuncture then providing those links might be a good idea, though. Rafał Pocztarski 00:13, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Uhm, acupuncture IS quackery.......
Just for the record, the abstract of the second paper on “the science of acupuncture” starts with:
Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years and is effective in a wide range of situations. It has not been integrated into modern health care primarily because of lingering suspicions that it is not scientific. A bioenergetic model has been developed to explain nearly all aspects of acupuncture and meridian theory, but there remains a definite prejudice against human energetic theories in the medical-scientific community, which must be overcome before integration can take place.
Rafał Pocztarski 00:19, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The latest meta-analysis for the Cochrane library finds evidence for a small but significant effect on PONV by stimulation of the P6 acupuncture point: as this is the most recent study currently available (march 2004), i thought it was relevant. I have quoted all the authors conclusions as I am always suspicious about precis about what author's actually said. Meta-analyses are generally agreed to be of more worth than individual studies like the Heidelberg study (which has been criticised: more details later).

BScotland.

One line destoryes the credibiblty of the meta analysis "none of which reported adequate allocation concealment". Not one experiment was even single blinded. As for meta analysis being better than single studies where did you get that idea?Geni 11:49, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)


Sheesh.I didnt say it was the case, i said it was generally agreed to be the case, which is ..er...generally accepted. Of course one good study is worth more than a meta-analysis of twenty (or whatever) bad studies. I mean, duh. However, the Cochrane has a generally good reputation, and I thought that the results of their meta-analysis should be included. I also included another conclusion from another study that points out that whereas most studies point to a beneficial aspect to acupuncture, few of these studies are of an acceptable standard, and that more research is clearly necessary. BScotland.

Spamming

An anonymous user at 62.49.59.192 keeps adding [8] [9] this link:

and now with a new domain:

to the External links section. Incidentally, 62.49.59.192 is an IP address of tai-chi-chuan.demon.co.uk, no less... This “very informative site about acupuncture” is in fact an advertisement of “The College of Chinese Medicine, Three Year Part Time Weekend Professional Training Course in Acupuncture Chinese Herbal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Diagnosis.” The first time it got posted, I changed [10] that link to the real website title, wondering whether that advertisement should stay at all. (At that time I didn’t know that it was added from an IP in the same domain.) Later, someone else has removed it, and now someone from the IP of that website has added another “very informative site about Acupuncture” link, which I am now removing. Please stop adding links to your website. If you want traffic for your training course, consider buying AdWords on Google. Wikipedia is not a place for spamming. Rafał Pocztarski 03:55, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

colorpuncture

Does anyone know anything about colorpuncture [[11]],[[12]]?

I don't know anything about colorpuncture but French auricular acupuncture uses color filters in their treatments.

Controversy

The Acupuncture article is top-heavy with at least mildly PoV commentary and long quotes about effectiveness or ineffectiveness. Its inclusion in such volume in a general article on the subject is PoV: it is not absurd to claim that responsible consumers of med care can reasonably risk making decisions about seeking out acupuncture without consulting their physicians, but it is entirely reasonable to argue that no one without training in physiology and experimental design should do so. I will split everything after somewhere in the middle of "Purported benefits" out to a Controversies on effectiveness of acupuncture or Claims of effectiveness of acupuncture article, and substitute a 'graph pointing at the new article, unless someone better qualified does so soon. That will provide a less PoV relationship between the general interest topic and the specialized one. --Jerzy(t) 19:55, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

Dated NCAHF Statement

The National Council Against Health Fraud statement cited in the article stated that acupuncture had not been proven in scientific research in the last 20 years. However, that statement was released in 1991. As the PubMed link will show you, there have been a number of more recent studies and meta-analyses of acupuncture.

Unsigned outline that was originally put at the top of this page

Here's my attempt to untie the knots of a debatable alternative health topic:

A proposed outline to help organize all that's written before

1) Overview of acupuncture as one element of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)

a) Alternative medicine caveat, 'bioenergy field' observations are an issue, etc.
b) Brief history of highlights in TCM over last 1,000 years (extends back 5,000)
c) Growth and spread of availability, acceptance within medical community, NIH
d) Insurance plan provisions for acupuncture treatments and diagnoses treated.
e) Do not ever avoid or put off seeing a regular doctor for medical complaints.

2) Theory and Practicse of Traditional Chinese Medicine

a) Yin Yang, 5 Phase association and Elements, Organs, Meridians, Acupoints etc.
b) Nature of healthy harmonious function versus disease/pathological function
c) Modalities of treatement: needles, moxa, massage, exercize, diet, meditation, herbs, lifestyle
d) Updated theories and models explaining how TCM treatment may provide effective benefits
e) The as of yet unexplained and yet to be substantiated aspects, i.e. claims only supported by tradition.
f) References for more information, studies, and study guides.

3) A visit to the TCM practioner

a) Referal from doctor for conditions and treatments with ICD9 codes (yes, insurance pays some.)
b) Assessment and diagnosis, appearance, tongue, pulse, sound, smell, palpitation; informing practioner of drugs taken, diseases, STDs, etc. Use of accessories, electronics.
c) Treatment plan: acute versus chronic treatment plans, cooperation with other plans, modalities
d) Not intended to supplant/replace needed surgery, drugs, and contemporary medical treatement.
e) Assessing the practitioner
i) Level of education and supervised hours clinical training
ii) Level of cooperation with medical clinics, hospitals, etc.
iii) Scope of practise and specializations
iv) BBB rating, issues with state licensing body, etc.
v) Quality of referrals from other practioners, patients

4) Table with Pro & Con arguments concerning validity of Traditional Chinese Medicine Acupuncture

a) Replicable studies, tested hypotheses and outcomes, NIH articles
b) Links to university articles/studies concerning medical value of acupuncture
c) Summary arguments and conclusions pro and con
d) Editorial observations and comment

5) Lists of accredited colleges

a) US, CA, UK, Europe
b) China, Japan, Pacific Rim
c) Elsewhere

6) Lists of reference books and other resources

a) overview texts, introductions, basics
b) reference material covering material appearing on board exams.
c) internet sites with reasonable quality information
d) books covering intesting developments
e) electronics and other devices used in current treatments

COMMENT: I do not believe we should ever be seeing referrals here to specific practioners/clinics. Colleges with accreditation may be listed especially if they are host to teacher/researchers publishing peer reviewed articles of scientific value. It should be reasonable to link to peer reviewed journals, studies, etc. and where permitted by the author/publisher. These might provide a sound starting point for serious debates.

At this point, I have to admit newcomer Unipedia seems to have a better written article than this current one: http://www.unipedia.info/Acupuncture.html

I don't understand. The article referenced above appears to be a straight copy of the Wikipedia article. P0M 03:25, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have moved this new outline because discussion pages are, by convention, added to at the end of the page. Once somebody had gone into something else at the bottom of this page, most interested parties would not even have seen it since serial readers will automatically jump to the "new stuff." P0M 00:58, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Neutrality

I have a fairly good background in this subject for someone who is has not been trained in traditonal Chinese medicine. The problems that I see, actually, are with the POV of the people whose critiques of accupuncture are referenced in this article. Interested readers should study The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine, Manfred Porkert, 1974. (MIT Press?) to get a more adequate basis for understanding these issues. Complaining that Chinese texts on accupuncture do not conform to Western terminology and do not use Western concepts is a little like criticizing Ravi Shankar for not playing Indian music in the equal tempered scale that is the standard of most (but not all) Western music.

Before one can tell whether an Indian musician is playing "out of key," one would have to know the rules for the tuning that s/he is supposed to be using.

With regard to Chinese medicine and its theory, one should first understand what the practitioners are actually claiming as their rationales, and then one can evaluate their medical practice on two different bases: (1) whether their rationales are logically coherent, internally consistent, and whether they are responsibly evaluating the efficacy of the various treatments that are available to them. (2) The efficacy of their treatments as compared to other available treatments.

The fact that some treatments used in Western medicine are not very effective is not an argument against the legitimacy of Western medicine. It simply reflects the fact that some diseases are more difficult to treat than others, and that Western medicine may not have discovered a really satisfactory treatment yet. The fact that some treatments work better with some patients than with others is, likewise, not an argument against Western medicine but only an objective recognition that matching treatment to patient may require time and effort. The same standards should apply to Chinese medicine. This article should aid the general reader to understand the theory and practice of Chinese medicine. Questions of what Western medicine thinks about Chines medicine should be secondary.

Bad medicine happens when theory takes precedence over objective evidence that some treatment is useless or even counterproductive. P0M 03:16, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Acupuncture

"This article should aid the general reader to understand the theory and practice of Chinese medicine. Questions of what Western medicine thinks about Chinese medicine should be secondary."

As a trained licensed practitioner of Acupuncture I feel compelled to agree with the comment I have quoted - but would consider it futile to put much effort into a debate about the efficacy of Chinese medicine. The practice of medicine is more political than most would imagine and less scientific than many would like to claim. I succeed with clients on a daily basis. I treat many issues that have not been successfully treated in other ways. I refer people to Western trained doctors, I have MD's as clients. I think it worthy to note that nearly 1 in 4 persons worldwide rely upon a form of TRADITIONAL medicine (read- 'alternative medicine based on theories several hundred years in use') as their primary care modality.

Many people here just love to bash Chinese medicine because they don't understand it. They claim it is just voodoo science, they say the Chinese herbs are poisons etc. But they fail to read the newspaper on how many over-the-counter medications were pulled off the market recently by the FDA. The American pharmeceutical companies have been feeding people with poisons too, but these bashers just ignore to see that those so called scientific studies are just as useless as voodoo in some cases. At least, the Chinese herbs have been in use for thousands of years whether they are poison or not. To me, it is just a kettle calling the pot black. There are many scientific researches being done on the Chinese medicine to figure out how it worked for thousand of years. When something is not proven true scientifically yet, it does not imply it is false by default. It is just basic logic. I guess when our ancestors killed pain with willow barks, they didn't understand how it worked either, but it does not mean it is not effictive unless it is made into Aspirin pills. Kowloonese 07:37, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
I think I just heard somebody on NPR a couple of days ago who said that aspirin would have trouble getting approved by the FDA today because it has side effects. My point is that with some medications we probably do not have double-blind tests to prove their effectiveness because they have been used effectively for so long that people do not test them unless it begins to look like they may cause previously unexpected problems. With aspirin we learned via individual physicians noticing that their patients had problems and then the information got collected and evaluated. (Now we recommend that younger patients not be given aspirin for flu-like symptoms.) P0M 14:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I don't care whether medicine is "Chinese" or "Western", but I do care whether it really works. The only way to be sure it works is with randomized-controlled trials. With RCTs you don't have to know how something works to find out whether it works. Unfortunately, in many cases RCTs are not yet available and you have to go with what you've got until they are. In the "West" there is a system in place, albeit imperfect, to verify that medications on the market are reasonably effective and harmless. What is the corresponding system for traditional medicine? Art Carlson 11:33, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)
That's a good question. There are studies being done on some treatments. There is another problem in that even with the best modern medications we are learning that people with different genetic constitutions may react very differently to different medications. There is now one preferred treatment for some heart conditions for black people because what has been working well for other groups has not had good outcomes for them. Carry that idea to acupuncture, where you are presumably balancing a system in somewhat the same way that a mechanic balances a new tire on your car. Whether the treatment works may well depend on the skill of the practitioner.
In Chinese herbal medicine, the formula is supposed to be adjusted according to the yin-yang balance of each particular patient. The formula is often a cocktail of many herbs to achieve a certain balance. In western medicine, they only test one drug in one treatment and since interaction among drugs are not tested, they just avoid cocktails all together. Only in the past decade, they started to develop "cocktail" prescription for AIDS patients. Chinese doctors have been using "cocktail" for thousands of years. Testing cocktails is not easy because of so many interacting factors especially the composition should be adjusted per patient. Kowloonese 19:18, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
(1) Take an herbal medicine, say cinchona tree bark for malaria, and analyze what chemicals it contains. Test the components one by one, and you will find that only one of them, quinine, makes a difference. The same with the aspirin in willow bark. For most herbal medicines that have been proven effective, it has been found that one particular indegredient is active. That is one rational for testing pharmaceuticals individually. (2) Another practical reason is that it is unmanageable to test all combinations. Many binary combinations have been tested, but it is difficult enough to test the thousands of medicines individually much less the millions of binary combinations. No system of medicine that uses "cocktails" can possibly have made tests of any significant fraction of the combinations it uses. (3) The only way that using "cocktails" can work consistently (unless you believe in magic) is by having a valid theory of operation. The drug combinations used to treat AIDS are the result of an understanding developed over decades of research costing billions of dollars. If practitioners of TCM actually have such a theory, it would be possible to prove the validity of their choice of cocktails (though not of their way of thinking about it) by letting them diagnose and prescribe but substituting a placebo for half of their remedies. This has never been done successfully. Art Carlson 20:07, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)
I agree with you it is almost impossible to test Chinese herbal medicine because it is always a cocktail. But can you prove it is ineffective when it is not tested. Chinese doctor have been curing people with these cocktails. In TCM, the doctor knows the curing properties and side effects of each herb, they use a few herbs to target the symptoms and use other herbs to counteract the side effects. Yes, TCM have theories, though the theories were formed by trial and error and obversations over generations. Each practitioner designs the cocktail based on his diagnosis, it is more like the art of cooking, different cooks have different receipes. Do you need to analyse a meal scientifically to prove that it is delicious? Most of these formula have not gone through double blind tests, some are being researched by modern scientists. Kowloonese 20:58, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
I don't expect TCM to muster the quantity and quality of evidence supporting conventional medicine, but is there any reliable evidence that a Chinese cocktail works better than any single ingredient or better than a conventional alternative? Art Carlson 05:26, 2005 Apr 23 (UTC)
The answer is yes according to the Chinese herbal doctors. In TCM, there is something called yao4yin3zi0 (藥引子) which literally means "medicine triggers" (or catalyst) without them the recepe does not work. If single ingredient would work, they would not have searched and found the catalyst. Kowloonese 11:30, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
What would you make of "conventional" alternatives that were originally part of the Chinese pharmacopeia?
No problem. My point is that there is evidence-based medicine (which doesn't care where an idea came from, only whether it works) and everything else. Medicine as practiced in the West has a large overlap with evidence-based medicine, while TCM has a small overlap. Some elements of TCM have presumably been verified and taken up by conventional medicine. I would be very interested to hear some examples. Do you know any? Art Carlson 10:12, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)
It might be unethical for a Chinese doctor to use a single ingredient when he believed that a combination of ingredients would provide a better treatment, but for a test of medicines using subjects who gave informed consent, then it should be o.k. to give single-herb or even single component test doses to people. To me it would make better sense to establish the pharmacological efficacy of individual components first in double-blind comparisons, and then to test the efficacy of components.
As for "which drug is better," how do you mathematically calculate a score that includes things like rapidity of reduction of white cell count, patient discomfort from headaches and other side effects, etc., etc. It seems to me that just within Western medicine there are alternative medicines that all have their share of advantages and disadvantages. There are probably a dozen approved OTC medications for my sore throat, for instance. Are we sure that some people favor one cure and other people favor another cure for purely subjective reasons? P0M 03:38, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Something really useful, I think, would be to get instantaneous feedback as the needles are being manipulated, with periodic follow-ups -- just to see whether anything is really changing. That would be a start. You wouldn't know, in some cases, whether the change was useful, but at least you would distinguish between treatments that don't do anything at all other than cause a slight amount of pain and treatments that, e.g., drop the pulse rate of the patient from 180/minute to 90/minute within half an hour. P0M 14:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Any proof pf breakable needles?

The article says: "acupuncture needles are very thin and can break." I can see where hypodermic needles might break, because they are made to be rigid. But the ordinary acupuncture needle is made of spring steel, and, moreover, it is designed for one-time use. I spend lots of time in my pasture trying to get ordinary iron wires to break (being too lazy to walk back to the house for a pair of nippers), and getting any kind of wire to break requires bending it back and forth at a sharp angle very many times. The same thing applies to guitar strings, which are steel wires of the same type as the acupuncture needles. They break, but only when tuned very tight and then played very enthusiastically for some time. If I were chained to a desk and forced to make an acupuncture needle break I think I would try to drive the needle as rapidly as possible through flesh into some nice flat bone and hope that the needle would shatter. But it would only shatter if at some point the metal had been crystallized. So I would only try each needle once and hope that my captors would mess up and give me a lot of needles that hadn't received good quality control. Of course, if I were permitted to cheat I would heat treat it so that it became very rigid and brittle.

Some acupuncture needles are special-purpose and not made of spring steel. Is that the kind of needles that are known to break? Am I missing something? I just can't see spring steel breaking under any normal circumstance. P0M 04:37, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I am a acupuncturist. The needles do not break anymore. I have tied them in knots and they do not break. The needles are a lot like stiff cat whiskers in flexibility and size. Back when needles were reused and the steel was of lesser quality they broke after much use and autoclaving. Some places still use reusable needles in this world and they are still subject to this problem thus we are trained never to insert the needles all the way in. The needles tend to break at the handle and thus can still be pulled out in most cases.

There was a study published in Japan in 2003 that detailed a woman who suffered damage to her peroneal nerve after the tip of an acupuncture needle broke off during her treatment. Unfortunately the acupuncturist was unwilling to cooperate with the study, and so details regarding reusable/disposable needles and exactly how it happened are unclear. See Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, volume 85-A, number 5, May 2003, pp916-918 for full article.Piekarnia 08:52, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

New Research links

I'm fairly surprised to see that the impression given by the BBC article (to which I'd linked: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4493011.stm ) could be as far from the truth as the abstract ([13]) appears to prove it to be. Is the abstract misleading when out of context perhaps? Can somebody with full access to the journal's database please check and compare with the BBC news article to see if their story is completely wrong? If it is I'd like to ask the BBC for an explanation.

--wayland 11:58, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand. What do you think is so misleading about the BBC precis? I have read the whole article in the journal (which is now linked) and it seemed reasonable. The key point which anti-acupuncturists would want to concentrate on is that NONE of the three 'treatments' reduced pain, although none of them were expected to either.

  • Well, right at the beginning, the BBC news article states: "Scientists say they have proof that acupuncture works in its own right." So the reader is thinking "proof that acupuncture works...okay, I'll read on..."

Then, further on, the article states: "The researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to see what was happening in the brains of people having acupuncture treatment for arthritis pain." So the reader is thinking "The treatment was for pain and they have proof that it works, so therefore that should mean the pain was reduced..."

Further on, the article states: that both the trick needle treatment and the real acupuncture activated an area of the brain associated with the production of natural opiates - substances that act in a non-specific way to relieve pain and that in real acupuncture, in addition, another region of the brain, the insular, was excited by the treatment. "This was a pathway known to be associated with acupuncture treatment and thought to be involved in pain modulation."

So the general impression given is that the acupuncture reduced pain and that two areas of the brain believed to be associated with pain reduction were observed to be activated. The article fails to mention that the three interventions " did not modify the patient's pain." (which is clearly stated in the abstract of the original published paper).

The false impression was also strongly given in the BBC radio news and television news both of which were broadcast that day.

>>>>>>>Fair enough, although I don't agree. The BBC key para, it seems to me is that 'When the researchers analysed the patients' PET scan results they found marked differences between the three interventions. '. I read the article and did not infer that the acupuncture treatment reduced pain. The journal article of course does not claim that acupuncture reduced pain, and of course pointed out the obvious that it was not expected to either (one session of acupuncture hardly ever has any effect).BScotland

>>>>Incidentally someone might want to mention this piece of research: http://tiny url.com/bkc3a (I added that space between tiny and url because wikipedia told be that tinyurl was a blacklisted website and asked me to remove the link 203.4.250.227 13:29, 7 March 2006 (UTC)JeremyG)

Chakras, the tobiscope et al

I'm sorry to bring this up here, but I thought this might be of interest. An anonymous user has edited the Chakra article mentioning a "tobiscope", a device supposedly invented in 1965 by Russian scientists to measure... something (meridians, life forces, ki?). This person claims that (1) chakras coincide with acupuncture points and meridians, and (2) both can be detected using this apparatus (and similar ones). Does anybody here know about this tobiscope? What about other devices? The article on chakras was well-balanced so far, and I don't want to cause an edit war there; Acupuncture seems like the place to ask about advice on such claims. Thanks! --Pablo D. Flores 03:20, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

It's a good question. People all over the world learn things from their bodies, and, if people are being reasonably objective, they should come to some of the same observations. That being said, I don't see chakras marked on my acupuncture charts. That doesn't mean that Chinese people don't know about them or at least have similar ideas. Your anonymous user may be getting confused in the different universes of discourse involved in Chinese thought. The Chinese have long talked about the dan4 tian2, for instance, and that corresponds to one of the chakras if I recall correctly. The idea that there is something special from a spiritual/psychic standpoint about the area below the navel has some confirmation in Western thought too. For reasons too complicated to go into here I got into a discussion with a man and his wife about quelling violent outbursts from youths under extreme accumulated stress (bad family/social conditions for years, for instance). The young lady said that she worked as a sort of matron in a live-in facility for youths that had been removed from their previous social/family environment to give them a chance to regain some degree of equilibrium. She said that their explicit instructions were that in case a young person became violent they were to attempt to restrain them with one hand and apply firm pressure to the abdominal area with the other hand. At that point her husband, who was pretty deeply involved in yoga, said that the method made good sense to him since it was using a chakra.
As for the tobiscope, if what I've found by Googling the term is correct, it is just an electrical device used to measure resistance. I've experimented with the mesurement of resistance on the human body, and it quickly becomes clear that it is tricky. You can get an inexpensive multimeter from any place that supplies people who repair radios, etc., who experiment with electronics, etc. They are not very expensive, being, essentially, a coil of wire that forms an electromagnet balanced against a spring so that the more current flows through the harder the needle is pulled against the spring.
What you will quickly discover is that if you want to be objective you have to fabricate a device that will use spring pressure to put a measured pressure on the electrical probe that you move along the surface of the body to measure its resistance at different points. If you just use an ordinary probe, which is really nothing more than a wire that is thick enough that you won't prick yourself with it and strong enough that you won't easily bend it, you will discover that the resistance you measure will depend inversely on the amount of pressure you apply to the probe. (That's why you sometimes can get a car to start by taking loose the connections to the battery, cleaning everything up, and then tightening the connection.) In simple language, electricity gets through more easily as you press harder and make a better contact. Of course, if you break the skin and get contact between your apparatus and your blood you will get a very low resistance measure indeed.
All of that detail is important because people trying to prove the electrical conductivity of the accupuncture points is low have been observed to move the probe lightly over the skin until they get to the point where they know an accupuncture point is supposed to be, and then they will press harder on the probe, the light will come on or the needle will swing, and they will claim that they've proved something.
I never had the time and money (grad students frequently have little of either) to make a very good probe, but just using a regular probe and moving it around while trying to maintain an equal pressure I could never find any obvious differences of resistance except right over the veins that stand up on the backs of my hand. The reason is pretty clear, the electricity goes through a thin layer of skin and then finds a good electrical conductor in the form of the blood and from there it goes through the blood system to the second probe (which is usually a fairly tight band of conductive stuff around one of your ankles).
There is some religious Daoist stuff, and/or stuff involved with qi4 gong1, that talks about the dan4 tian2 (cinnabar field) and other tian2, but those materials have probably been influenced by Indian ideas for nearly 2000 years, so even if they claim "we knew this all along" and point to native elements of thought, there still could be some influence in the terms of how early texts are interpreted. (The Dao4 De2 Jing1 has an esoteric interpretation that makes it into a religious Daoist "hygiene" text. That's an example of how one school of thought can creatively reinterpret the works of another field of thought.)
Short version: Unless the person can come up with some very good citations, the assertions should not be accepted. IMHO they don't fall into the area of "things everybody knows and is too lazy to look up the citations to." (My usual fault.) P0M 06:29, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanations. I'm a skeptic myself (I don't believe in ki/qi or special energetic points in the body), but I recognize there's a difference between the ancient traditions of China and India, on one hand, and fringe New Age material. I came to Chakra following a request to make the article NPOV, and together with a few others we did some work and the article was left OK, informative and not controversial. Then this guy came along with his tobiscope... He doesn't get the Wikipedia mindset at all and I was getting really angry, so at Talk:Chakra I promised to leave the page alone until June (probably someone will fix the tobiscope thing by then). Thanks again. --Pablo D. Flores 10:37, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Ötzi's acupuncture tattoos attribution

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/iceman/evidence/tattoos.html

Unfortunately the above URL only gives a report of a claim. I've think I've read that some people who have studied the tattoos say they are not close enough to actual acupuncture points to be convincing. I'd like to see photos.

As far as other cultures knowing something about acupuncture, I remember that my grandmother, who was born a decade or so after the end of the Civil War, told me that one of her uncles (or maybe it was brothers) was adept at treating headaches by massaging certain areas on the head. In retrospect, it sounds like the man must have been massaging acupuncture points. My mother and her brothers had a fair amount of orientalia. There was a ma jiang set in my grandmother's house, among other things, so it is possible that there was also more transmission of medical practice info at that time than we might assume today.

It is possible that people discover these things independently. My high school biology teacher taught us a point on the body that will inhibit a sneeze (useful information for footpads). It works, but it is not on my acupuncture charts. P0M 23:34, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps then we should make it a bit more clear in the article that it is a supposition. Interestingly, the point system that I have learned studying with the Wu teachers doesn't correspond exactly to the published acupuncture charts I've seen. They do correspond, but I'd say only by about 70-80%. Fire Star 01:59, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
there ares so many different acupuncture charts that you have a hard time finding a point that isn't on a chart somewhere.Geni 02:04, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Especially since the meridian lines that are all over the charts (or any line, for that matter) are collections of an infinite number of points! ;-) Fire Star 16:20, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I might add the Smithsonian Natural History Museum has an Otzi exhibit and makes the acupuncture claim there as well. -S

I did a quick spin around Google and found:

http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/archives2000/jun/06iceage.html

which (assuming they are being responsible) shows that there are some points that are dead on, some that are near misses, and some that are more remote. It isn't clear how many more tattoes there might be on the body.P0M 22:41, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why acupuncture cannot be proven to be effective

As an acupuncturist in North America, I can see first hand the beneficial effects of acupuncture on my patients who come to me primarily because they find that Western medicine cannot help them or that the side effects of medication/surgery outweigh the benefits.

On the question of the efficacy of acupuncture, with the thousands of years experience notwithstanding, the so-called "studies" done today in North America are mostly ill designed and under funded. The question always comes down to money - who gains and who loses from a properly done study that would actually show the benefits of acupuncture. To be more precise, those who gain are the practitioners of CAM and the general public, while those who lose are the pharmeceutical companies. Doctors have nothing to lose because all they need is 300 hours to become an acupuncturist (which is not enough time to learn all the points, but that is another story). The business of producing drugs depends on keeping patients, not necessarily healing them. Studies that are funded by those companies present with outcomes that show their product in a positive light, or they are done again and again until the desired result is acheived.

Consider if acupuncture were proven to be effective in curing many diseases more effectively and with less side effects than pharmeceuticals - insurance companies would need to start covering acupuncture, and the reliance on drugs would be greatly diminished. An entire industry would start losing money. This cannot be allowed to happen.

If we were really concerend about health, we would integrate both Western medicine and CAM for the most comprehensive treatment. They are two extremes that can be seen from the micro and macro levels - that is, that drugs work on the cellular level while acupuncture works on the "wholistic" level.

The article on acupuncture in this encyclopedia presents the practice of acupuncture for the layman in terms that are easily understandable; however, it first takes the point of view that acupuncture does not work and then cites sources presenting both sides of the argument, having first already taken a side. It is unfitting for such an encyclopedia that presents drugs from a neutral perspective.

Please sign your postings. I learned to do so after aggressively attacking something that it later turned out I had written myself. ;-)
You are quite right about beginning an article with a POV judgment on the value of whatever is being discussed. The correct way to handle things, assuming that we are going to cover the subject at all, is to describe the subject in terms of its own theory, its own ideas on how it is supposed to work. Once readers have been given an unbiased view of the subject they can be referred to secondary articles that deal with criticisms, alternative takes on the question, etc.
For instance, it would be correct to say that Newtonian physics has been proven false. But it would not be helpful to readers who want to understand what Newton succeeded in figuring out about the Universe to tell them that they should ignore Newtonian physics and direct their attention immediately to Quantum physics and Relativity. The appropriate thing to do is to explain how Newton conceptualized the Universe, how he created a model of the Universe that explained most things so well that we still use it today for almost all purposes, and then go on to inform the reader that the theory broke down under certain exptreme conditions of size and speed, and that those failures led to both reconceptualizations of the subject matter and to new formulas that express reliably the new discoveries made in the course of working out all of the consequences of Newtonian Physics.
The problem for the general reader in trying to understand accupuncture is that the conceptual system by which the entire Universe is undersood is incompatible with the Western view at the same fundamental level at which Newtonian physics is founded. The Western reader wants to talk about matter and energy, unconsciously having in mind the very sophisticated Newtonian concepts, when the Chinese theoretician wants to talk about qi theory.
Neither the Newtonian nor the Qi theory can be assumed to be true. Both are models for understanding processes that go on in the Universe. Ask somebody who has a well founded understanding of both systems how to translate an observation made in terms of one theory into the terms of the other theory and the right answer will be, "You can't get there from here."
Both theories talk about the same Universe and, more-or-less, the same entities. To put that observation in simpler language, both a Western doctor and a traditional Chinese doctor can look at the same patient. What is available to each of them is presumably the same. I.e., the patient doesn't change colors or anything depending on which doctor is looking at him or her. But the two doctors are looking at the patient through two different sets of colored glasses, metaphorically speaking. The Chinese doctor says something is going on with the patient's triple burner and the Western doctor asks where in hell the patient's triple burner is, trying to find a proper anatomical term for it. But the Chinese doctor is dealing with systems of function, not with physically discrete organs.
The productive way to handle the fact that the Chinese doctor and the Western doctor are using different models to understand their patients and their problems is to keep firmly in mind that the patient comes first and the rational systems come afterwards and are used to codify insights, to put insights into what is going on with the individual patient into terms that another "speaker" of the same conceptual system can understand. So if something is going on with a patient and a Western doctor happens to notice it, that information may not be readily codified in terms of the Chinese doctor's model. I have no idea of how Chinese medicine understands stomach ulcers, but let's say that some Chinese doctor has been treating ulcers by accupuncture points that have nothing to do, ostensibly, with the stomach. The points are on the patient's ears, feet, and other places totally "remote" from the patient's stomach. The Western doctors have been telling patients to drink milk, stay away from pepper, etc., etc. for generations. Some patient tells them that milk does nothing for his ulcer but yogurt is almost a miracle cure. The doctors all scoff at this idea and ask him which little witch lady in which health food store he got that idea from. Then somebody notices that ulcer patients have unusual bacterial colonization of the stomach. The other doctors find polite synonyms for quack and idiot. The doctor drinks a culture of the bacteria, immediately comes down with an intense stomach ulcer problem, and then cures himself with a good dose of antibiotics (and hopefully saves himself a long recovery period by taking homemade yogurt). Now the Western doctor tells the Chinese doctor that ulcer patients have microbes in their guts that are physically attacking the stomach lining. Maybe that gives the Chinese doctor the idea that ways useful to treating infected wounds might be applicable to treating ulcers -- even though his theory might not have predicted that connection. And maybe it turns out that the ways that the Chinese doctor has been treating ulcer patients do indeed not having anything to do, directly, with the stomach, i.e., if you put all sorts of instrumentation to work look at the patient's stomach while he was being treated for ulcers, the stomach might not show any changes at all. But the Chinese doctor may have been doing things that do make changes that the Western doctor could observe in the "discrete" organs that the Western doctor identifies with the immune system. So the Western doctor learns that rather than using drugs to perk up the immune system, drugs that have side effects that nobody should ever want, perhaps, he can stimulate accupuncture points and get the same beneficial results with virtually no undesirable side effects.
Maybe the new contributor can help us see how to boil the stuff in Manfred Porkert's book down to encyclopedia size. He's the only one I know of who has tried to put the Chinese conceptual system, as it pertains to medicine, into English. It's a good book, i.e., responsible and thoroughly grounded in the Chinese systems, but it's several hundred pages and pretty rough going for the non-medical and non-Chinese philosophy crowd. P0M 18:54, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

New Material in Risks

I just added some minor new material to the risks section, but did not add sources. Both of my sources are already listed in 'external links.' FYI if anyone was curious. --User:Jeffmedkeff | Talk 00:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Pseudoscience

Why is there no pseudoscience tag on this page?! It's core belief is in Meridian and Qi (Chi) which has no basis in Science, cant be verified yet is passed off in Acupuncture as a practical reality, that is psuedoscience. Qi can be more closely aligned to an element of Chinese myth or religion, something cant be considered science if it is based on such a principle, this is pseudoscience for the same reason Feng Shui is. - UnlimitedAccess 18:45, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

It isn't pseudoscience because its underlying theory doesn't pretend to scientific validity. It underlying theory predates the scientific method by 2,000 years, at least, so it cannot pretend to be a scientific approach even if it wanted to. Science may certainly describe traditional Chinese medicine and the culture it grew from, from many different angles (archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, chemistry, biology, etc.), but as a subject to be studied, not a scientific theory. Theories may indeed be drawn about it, but those theories would be outside of TCM. The pretension to scientific validity is a necessary part of the definition of the term pseudoscience for use at Wikipedia. Some prefer protoscience for this sort of thing. There are many acupuncturists etc., especially in the West, who pretend to be scientific (especially the many medical doctors who now perform acupuncture in their clinics), but for us to paint the entire theory by the recent actions of some of its adherents in the article is proscribed by our original research policy. --Fire Star 19:23, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Good point, Fire Star. I think "prescientific" is a better term for TCM theory, and prescientific or not, it's also clinically useful! And even elegent, depending on the eye of the beholder. The NIH consensus statement itself notes that TCM theories "are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information but continue to play an important role in the evaluation of patients and the formulation of treatment in acupuncture." How much clearer can it be? The validity of acupuncture manifests in, and must be measured by, clinical efficacy. This is true irrespective of the culturally-conditioned ideas (which are, in effect, ancient and pragmatic mnemonic devices) that predict such efficacy. TCM theory is therefore an alternative, but still useful, lens through which to view the human organism. -Jim Butler 01:15, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Should acupuncture be called an art? Each practitioner's mastering of the skill is different. Some masters achieve great result with their patient. Some get no result at all. Like a Western doctor drawing blood, some get it right the first time, but some give the patient bruises all over the arm. When blood does not come out, can one jump to conclusion that blood is not there? Blood vessles are visible so practice would improve the skill. It would be hard to master the same with acupuncture. Kowloonese 02:21, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
I wouldn't call acupuncture only an art, but I agree there is definitely an element of art to it. A lot of doctors say that biomedicine is both art and science. One could say something similar about TCM. It's not a science in the Western sense, but the theory is certainly systematic and internally consistent. I think it's fine for the article to call it a therapeutic technique or healing modality, and maybe say that as with other healing modalities, there is an art to doing it effectively. -Jim Butler 03:28, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Let's clean up the page

This article on acupuncture is truly quite appalling. There are several barriers that I see in cleaning this up:

  1. There are a large number of people who insist on talking about all the hype and propaganda about the validity of acupuncture rather than sticking to the facts. This is not a new system of medicine, but it is new as far as western medicine is concerned. The research is still being done, therefore quoting statistics from the late 80's aint gonna cut it if there is more recent research from this century that proves otherwise. People more interested in fuelling the political debate rather than positively contributing to publishing knowledge of the topic on this wiki should do so in an informed and reasonable way in a separate article rather than taking up space in the main page. Perhaps the title of that page could be "The debate about the validity of acupuncture" or something similar.
  2. The page NEEDS to be seriously reworked. The headings listed above seem to be quite good for a start. If no one can suggest anything better, perhaps it might be worthwhile to make a start on those headings. Unless someone can come up with some good reasons otherwise within the next week or two, I'll make a start.
  3. There is an absolute truckload of scientific studies done into acupuncture, and I don't think we really need to have a synopsis of all of them on this page. We need to work out a way to either a) get rid of them b) put them in an entirely separate article possibly titled "research related to acupuncture" Piekarnia 09:50, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Interesting debate

I found the debate here most interesting. I have learnt quite a lot. Someone reported that it works on animals too. 1)Does it work on plants too? Has anyone tried it on plants? 2)Since the porcupine has in-built needles all over its body, is it the most healthiest animal? 3)Also , how do you define cure? If patient say he is cured, is he cured? If doctor say patient is cured, is he cured?

(1)Because plant rights advocates reject moxibustion, results are few and far between.
(2)Only those that engage in frequent venery seem to be more healthy than others.
(3)See refutations of your covert point by the well-known specialist, 方琵.