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Acupuncture May Trigger a Natural Painkiller
Pickens writes "USNWR is reporting that the needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering the natural painkilling chemical adenosine. There are also indications that acupuncture's effectiveness can be enhanced by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug — deoxycoformycin — that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual. Dr. Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group of mice with paw discomfort. The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain. By contrast, mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine function gained no benefit from the treatment."
Read below for some acupuncture skepticism engendered by other recent studies.
However, many remain skeptical of acupuncture claims. Ed Tong writes in Discover Magazine that previous clinical trials have used sophisticated methods to measure the benefits of acupuncture, including 'sham needles' (where the needle's point retracts back into the shaft like the blade of a movie knife) to determine if the benefits of acupuncture are really only due to the placebo effect. 'Last year, one such trial (which was widely misreported) found that acupuncture does help to relieve chronic back pain and outperformed "usual care". However, it didn't matter whether the needles actually pierce the skin [paper here with annoying interstitial], because sham needles were just as effective,' writes Tong. 'Nor did it matter where the needles were placed, contrary to what acupuncturists would have us believe.'"
However, many remain skeptical of acupuncture claims. Ed Tong writes in Discover Magazine that previous clinical trials have used sophisticated methods to measure the benefits of acupuncture, including 'sham needles' (where the needle's point retracts back into the shaft like the blade of a movie knife) to determine if the benefits of acupuncture are really only due to the placebo effect. 'Last year, one such trial (which was widely misreported) found that acupuncture does help to relieve chronic back pain and outperformed "usual care". However, it didn't matter whether the needles actually pierce the skin [paper here with annoying interstitial], because sham needles were just as effective,' writes Tong. 'Nor did it matter where the needles were placed, contrary to what acupuncturists would have us believe.'"
Old news
"Hieroglyphs and pictographs have been found dating from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE) which suggest that acupuncture was practiced along with moxibustion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture#Antiquity
So, poking the skin with a sharp object triggers the release of painkillers by the body? I'm impressed.
Where's Cartman when you need him!
At least we know what the point is now.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
...for those trying to defend the scientific method saying that a pseudoscience "cannot possibly work" because "there aren't any known methods through which it could operate".
The way to disprove a non-effect is by showing it indistinguishable from chance. Not by declaring that we can't think of any possible explanations.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I'd much rather have a positive effect from a placebo than from a drug that usually has nasty side-effects.
Sugapablo
Now that I have your attention bear with me...
It's one thing to say "this is BS"
It's another to say "we don't know how this may work, thus it doesn't mean that it works BUT IT ALSO DOESN'T MEAN IT DOESN'T"
There are skeptics and there are "skeptics". "skeptics" make their first reaction to everything "this is BS"
"Look, arteries may not have air inside them after all" "this is BS"
"hey maybe interactions between charged particles can be abstracted by using 'a field'" "this is BS"
It's ok to be skeptic, just keep your mind open before calling BS on everything. Good thing is these people never come up with a new theory or a new experiment usually.
how long until
Dr. Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group of mice with paw discomfort.
Family-friendly euphemism for "with their paws hacked off by the grad students".
mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Hah, but that's the paradox!
You can't have a placebo-effect unless you claim that the therapy actually works in itself.
You can't claim that a non-working therapy works unless you a a liar.
The placebo effect works better if the treatment is costly (in terms of money or discomfort - pain from needles)
So the placebo industry can only exist if they mislead and overcharge.
It's not a bug it's a feature!
X.
Similar pains in different people are triggered by different energetic imbalances. Oriental medicine has five elements, five rhythms that run through a person: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal (Air). Each meridian has characteristics of one of the elements.
But westerners who study acupuncture try to use the same points in their trials, when the study should be designed to address the individual's specific imbalances.
I've met a few mystics in the last few years, and my experience says that people who "scoff" at the notion that acupuncture is quackery are idiots. YMMV.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I compare acupuncture and qigong to time travel. Imagine if you were a time traveler and you wanted to convince someone who never *directly experienced* it that it was real. It isn't possible. The only way is to feel it yourself.
Acupuncture is based on lines of tendons and fascia "meridians" connecting between extremities and organs. Now "chi" at it's simplest level is nothing more than stimulating certain groups of nerves at will. And chigong is studying your internal alchemy to differentiate between the many different plexuses of nerves. For example I can concentrate on the arch of my foot up the inside of my thigh and stimulate my kidneys and adrenals. Tell me it's psuedoscience, so what? It's real to me. You just kind of have to shrug at skeptics, because they refuse to experience they can never be "convinced".
The book that really made it click for me was ironically a Qigong for Women book I think by Ferraro. But the teachers with the most complete work are Mantak Chia (internal) and Yang Jwing-Ming (external). Any book by either of those two will teach you the true science of chi, but you have to experience it for it to mean anything. All I'll say is they cure cancer with qigong, search for the studies its real; and if I got cancer I wouldn't be poisoning myself with radiation I'd be doing kungfu.
Um... yes?
Many things have been used for thousands of years. Many of those things have no positive effect. Many of *those* things are actively harmful.
You sound like a woman my wife had an argument with a decade or so ago, who insisted it was perfectly safe to give her children belladonna (and, yes, I *do* mean 'deadly nightshade') "because it's natural".
So just to be clear: acupuncture is a cult, a pseudo-science without basis in fact, just like its home companions homeopathy, yoga and Reiki.
Ah! You think Yoga has no basis in fact? There's some very toned and flexible hotties out there proving you wrong.
You can't take the sky from me...
I was too a very skeptical person, until I got a hormonal production disorder (I really don know its name in english, maybe later i can find a translation) that Western medicine said was impossible to cure and had to be countered with massive doses of neutralization of hormone medicines that would basically cripple me completely forever. I gave a shot and tried acupuncture since even death was better than those side effects. In 2 months the disorder was completely under control without any changes in my life but acupunture. The exams shown a reduction on the hormone production of more than 70%. I tough, ok that must be coincidence... stoped the treatment. Few months later the issue was back. Restarted the treatment and 1 month later was all under control again.... Even the doctors said to me, forget western medicie and stick to what is working. Since then I tried acupuncture for a lot of things, including issues that western medicine never was able to cure me like allergic reactions etc. I am still quite skeptical about almost everything, but I was faced with undeniable evidence that it has some VERY interesting results. People should spend less time trying to proof its or its not BS and more time trying to understand how to make people life better! And I pity the poor should that had the same diagnostics as me and went for the western "fully scientific" treatment. Medicine should be about saving people and making them feel better! Not about having reason about anything! Fool is the one that speaks without having real experience about it. Fool is the one that condems others to suffering just because the better path doe snot match his own beliefs. That is basically the same thing as religious fundamentalist.
How is yoga a pseudoscience? I was not aware there was even any attempted 'science' aspect to it at all, and my family is very active in yoga practices. Perhaps there are cultish groups that use and promote yoga, but unless I'm missing something very major yoga itself is not a pseudoscience.
I hate reading when scientists induce pain in animals to "try" to relief it.
Ah! You think Yoga has no basis in fact? There's some very toned and flexible hotties out there proving you wrong.
Well, ridiculous health claims (eg, treating autoimmune disorders, etc) associated with yoga are pseudo-science.
Similarly:
Chiropractic care for the treatment of back issues? Fact. Chiropractic care for the treatment of asthma? Pseudo-science.
Homeopathic treatment of dehydration? Fact. Homeopathic treatment of basically anything else? Pseudo-science.
Um... This is slashdot, after all.
I don't especially care to be called a fool. I was dragged to an acupuncturist by my wife. I had no doubts that it was a waste of time and money. However, I walked out of there pain free for the first time in 10 years. I don't care what skeptics think. I don't care what the mechanism is. I just know in my case it worked and am thankful for it.
BTW, I had been to many, many traditional doctors who couldn't even diagnose the cause much less provide any relief. None of the drugs they gave me helped at all.
Ah! You think Yoga has no basis in fact? There's some very toned and flexible hotties out there proving you wrong.
Well, ridiculous health claims (eg, treating autoimmune disorders, etc) associated with yoga are pseudo-science.
Ok, yes, there's True Believers that will tell you yoga cures cancer, feeds the poor and plugs the gulf of mexico's oil hole. But there is significant merit in the practice of Yoga for health benefits, even if it doesn't protect us from asteroid strikes.
You can't take the sky from me...
Chiropractic care for asthma when your asthma is caused by pressure and irritation to the lungs based on your crooked ass posture: Fact.
No, it's not. It's bullshit. Show me a single study that proves chiropractic care treats asthma, and I'll show you a flawed study.
And as an aside, anyone who believes "asthma is caused by pressure and irritation to the lungs based on your crooked ass posture" has no fucking clue what asthma actually is.
Not that I ever had asthma officially
Ah. I see. So you feel you can make concrete statements about asthma treatment when you've never actually been diagnosed with it. Well, I'll definitely take your opinions seriously...
Um... This is slashdot, after all.
Touché.
You can't take the sky from me...
And now, because we understand the mechanism of action upon which acupuncture is based, scientists may be able to develop more effective treatments, either by optimizing acupuncture treatment, or creating new treatments that make use of the same mechanism.
You should be thanking science, here. We now understand more about the world than we did before, and the result may be improved medicine for people such as yourself.
Chinese medicine has always included acupressure as an effective treatment. Indeed, it predates acupuncture -- not surprisingly, people noticed "it feels better if I press and rub here" before they thought, "hey, what if I stick a bamboo splinter into my skin so I can stimulate that point but free up my hands?" Pick up an acupuncture products catalog and you'll find a variety of "pellets" which can be taped to the skin to stimulate the points without puncturing the skin.
So at best, "sham" needles -- i.e., acupressure -- as a control for acupuncture is like using aspirin as a control while investigating a new painkiller.
The study that Yong (not "Tong") mentions also featured treatment via a set of points determined in advance by one therapist, and delivered by another. But when I see my acupuncturist (or even when I give a shiatsu treatment including the use of acupressure points), point selection is determined in part by the response to earlier points. So this is rather different than acupuncture as practiced by knowledgeable practitioners.
That study also excluded patients with previous acupuncture treatment for any condition; based on my experience, however, it seems that it takes some experience with acupuncture to learn how to give feedback to the practitioner, to recognize and report the de qi sensation, so the effectiveness of the treatment increases with experience. (Perhaps there is also something like the habituation required for a cannabis "high" at work here, with the patient learning to interpret and respond to new sensations.) And the study also excluded those with "specific causes of back pain", so would seem to likely include a high proportion of those whose complaints had a strong psychosomatic component, and so would be poorly suited to investigating the physiological mechanisms involved.
This is all too representative of the problems with much acupuncture research: what gets tested often has little to do with Chinese medicine as it is applied by knowledgeable practitioners.
Despite these problems, this study found that "Compared with usual care, individualized acupuncture, standardized acupuncture, and simulated acupuncture [i.e., acupressure] had beneficial and persisting effects on chronic back pain." Nor does the study's comparison of individualized acupuncture vs. standardized acupuncture justify Yong's claim that it did not matter where the needles were placed. It takes some twisting to interpret this study the way that Yong would like to.
And of course the placebo effect plays a role -- as it does in any treatment, including surgery. If my acupuncturist is doing nothing beyond triggering a placebo response in me, the results are still real, and what I pay her for the little show she puts on that lets whatever part of brain is responsible do its thing, is a bargain.
(My bias: I'm and NCCAOM Diplomate in Asian Bodywork Therapy; my practice is a small sideline to my computer geek day job.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Uh, that's because most water tables are large, so if you are above one, you can pretty much poke a well anywhere and find water. Of course the depth of each well may vary depending on substrate and which water table you actually hit. Also, the rate of available water (to pump or even if naturally pressurized) depends on the water table you strike.
Sorry man, you fell for the scam. (He may have "witched" past wells in the larger area and has studied the underlying aquifers. Every well drilled to depth and through various substrate will inform him. Shit, he may be a Geology drop-out.)
Mechanism is often lacking even in regular science, especially in medicine. Biochemistry and physiology are complicated, and we often have only a vague idea (if that) about what makes a particular drug work.
But mechanism isn't a necessary part. What is necessary is that something have measurable, demonstrable, repeatable effects. If you don't have that, you've got nothing. And this is especially important in medicine, where wishful thinking is extremely easy; people will fool themselves into thinking something helps, because they want it so desperately.
That's aside from the placebo effect, where things actually can have some some measurable benefits despite the explicit lack of mechanism. That's because the mechanisms are very complicated, and mental state can be a mechanism all by itself.
Science is most effective when it knows the mechanism, and science of all human endeavors is uniquely suited to finding mechanisms. That's because it starts with an insistence on measures, which gives you some idea what the "whole" is as you break it down into the "sum of the parts".
From mechanisms you can work forward with better efficiency. That doesn't mean you can't make progress without them, and much of medicine starts with a guess rather than a mechanism, e.g. maybe this willow bark will help with the headache. That guess becomes science once you can measure the effect.
When a scientist claims a "lack of mechanism", it happens in conjunction with a lack of demonstrated effect. It's like piling on: not only doesn't it work, there's no reason to believe it could work, so there's nowhere to go from here. At that point, pursuit of the guess usually stems solely from wishful thinking and not from any commitment to objectivity.
Hey, if something works for you, great -- even if it doesn't have the proper evidence to support it. Everyone needs a good placebo in their back pocket. Hell, there's even a remote/outside/small/minuscule chance that something about you is different than the rest of us and said treatment does actually work on you in some unknown way. Great. But really, I don't care how far out and strange a treatment may sound, it can be tested, but that takes time and money. People truly interested in helping their fellow humans out will spend the time and money to do the proper testing and those just trying to make a buck off the gullibility of our fallible human minds won't. Where do you want to put your trust?
It may not be fraudulent. He or she may be actually picking up clues, from experience, that a local farmer may not notice. Plant growth is certainly a useful indicator: layout of rock and hills may indicate where water from upstream or uphill is likely to channel into a particularly effective and reliable aquifer, effectively funneled by the underlying rock. That sort of expertise takes actual travel and study and practice that a local resident wouldn't have until pretty recently in history, so a traveling expert could be well worth the cost, even if they don't realize what they're an expert _in_.
In 2 months the disorder was completely under control without any changes in my life but acupunture.
Your anecdotal evidence is fantastic.
Now lets find 100 other people with the same positive outcome and figure out why acupuncture is working for all of you.
People should spend less time trying to proof its or its not BS and more time trying to understand how to make people life better!
::facepalm::
I'm glad your life is better, but many of us are not happy having gaps in our knowledge and filling in the blank with "magic" or "it works".
If acupuncture works so well, understanding why/how is critical for having it turned into a mainstream treatment.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Anedoctal? Depend on how you observe it. FACT is western medicine said (several doctors) I should be dead without that medicine or crippled usign it. Eastern medicine said I would live an OK life. FACT I am alive.. That leads to simple FACT that western medicine is NOT OWNER of the TOTAL truth (not saying the Eastern one is either). The WHOLE concept of eastern medicine is around principles that statistical annalysis is NOT A PROOF of anything, because youa re an individual, not a "representation of a popualtion" and the cure must be for YOU, not for the statistic. Until people can understand that there exist this fundamental rift in views of what define truth neither sides will ever agree on anything. I am skeptical on general sense of the word, SPECIALLY upon statistic being used as a tool to define the truth.
You touch slightly a very important point. Eastern medicine does to treat you as a sample of a population. you are an individual and the treatment is INDIVIDUAL for every person the same treatment will NOT be applied for different persons even with exact same sympthoms. All their medicine is based on the fact that you are and individual and tatistical annalysis means nothing to them. And I will surely put my trust today in the person that treats me, not the person that tries to treat a mythical NON EXISTENT generic human from a statistical representation based on a generic population.
Western medicine, eh? What has it ever done for you? Why can't the west be as clean, disease free and as long living as those eastern countries?
I forgot to add something. I amnot saying you shoudl jsut leave as magic and forget it. But the problem is a LOT of people put VERY hard efforts into just trying to prove its false no matter what. They just call things BS when they don match with their beliefs, and that is NOT scientific behavior. We should try to understand how it works. But for that you must first stop thinking that the way we analyse things is an undeniable and indisputable universal truth! While people keep trying to analyse eastern medicine as they analyse western one ( basically around statistics) you will never understand it! Statistics are not LAWS of nature, we are not a sample of a statistic pool and that is fundamental to try analyse acupuncture. Its like trying to understand the qualities of a poetry written in russian, reading only its translation to portuguese! Even worse is like trying to evaluate the quality of russian poetry by making statistical analysis of how well it sound to Brasilians reading it in French!
Poe's Law rears it's head once again.
In case people actually took that seriously, fisrt off, there is no such thing as 'western' medicine. That's a load of crap to try to act as if there are two valid forms of treatment. There aren't. There is scientifically proven medicine, and medicine that has not been proven/has been disproven. And that part about not trying to prove stuff, that's either great parody or bad logic. Anything that works, works. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. If a treatment works, it can be shown to work under proper trials. Acupuncture, like most alternative medicines, has not shown this. And that bit about fully scientific treatment, all science is is observation. That's it. Science is what can be seen, and until a thing is seen, science ramains unconvinced of the thing's existence. If homeopathy worked, or ghosts were real, or if there really were qi lines and crap, science would be able to at least observe them, even if we could not truly understand them.
That is basically the same thing as religious fundamentalist.
“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”
“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!
You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”
-Tim Minchin, "Storm"
People should spend less time trying to proof its or its not BS and more time trying to understand how to make people life better!
This sentence is self-contradictory. Understanding of what works and how it works is required to understand how to make people's lives better. In order to do the thing you say we should spend more time doing, we need to do the thing you say we should spend less time doing.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Anedoctal? Depend on how you observe it.
Not at all.
You don't seem to understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence
Taking your one case and stretching it to conclude "acupunture works" is anecdotal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
The WHOLE concept of eastern medicine is around principles that statistical annalysis is NOT A PROOF of anything, because youa re an individual, not a "representation of a popualtion" and the cure must be for YOU, not for the statistic. Until people can understand that there exist this fundamental rift in views of what define truth neither sides will ever agree on anything.
Statistics are the best we can do when dealing with 6 billion unique genetic combinations.
Maybe some day we'll discover that the spiritual aspects of eastern medicine are valid,
but until then, things like "scientific evidence" and "statistical analysis" are what we have.
Like I said before: Lets find 100 other people and figure out why acupuncture is working for all of you.
While people keep trying to analyse eastern medicine as they analyse western one ( basically around statistics) you will never understand it! Statistics are not LAWS of nature, we are not a sample of a statistic pool and that is fundamental to try analyse acupuncture.
For fuck's sake.
Propose an alternative method of analysis that is valid and reproducible.
If you can't do that, we'll stick with what's worked so far: the scientific method.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Now lets find 100 other people with the same positive outcome and figure out why acupuncture is working for all of you.
Or find some people who have had multiple doctors shrug their shoulders at, who have received reliable, repeatable relief from acupuncture, and just be grateful that there was something that provided a solution when western medicine failed them. Or you can present your argument to these people and see if it provides them relief.
I'm glad your life is better, but many of us are not happy having gaps in our knowledge and filling in the blank with "magic" or "it works".
Many people who have gotten relief would trade that kind of unhappiness for relief from the physical symptoms they experienced. It works well in some cases, and for those people, understanding why/how is not critical for relief.
If acupuncture works so well, understanding why/how is critical for having it turned into a mainstream treatment.
Go to China or Japan, try arguing that acupuncture is not a 'mainstream treatment', and see how far you get.
So it worked the same if they did acupuncture or didnt do acupuncture. What does this say about the quality of the study?
It says it's a good study, because they isolated adenosine as being the cause of the pain relief. If they hadn't done that, they couldn't say for sure that the adenosine released by the acupuncture was the mechanism.
The enemies of Democracy are
No one cares about your fake headaches.
Actually, given that there's an article on the front page of /. about "fake" treatments having a real effect on headaches, I would say somebody cares.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
From a scientific standpoint, the beginning and the end of the argument is this: Acupuncture posits that (1) energies within the body travel (2) along certain routes and (3) can be redirected using needles with the effect of (4) curing or treating human disease. There is exactly zero evidence to support any of these, charitably, very farfetched claims.
Skeptics very accurately point out that the placebo effect is very powerful and is not fully understood. However, more than that explains why acupuncture doesn't go the way of bloodletting, trepination or any of a hundred other quackeries over the centuries. Confirmation bias is a big one. A patient has just paid big bucks to a TCM practitioner and desperately wants to believe that the treatment will work. Of course, if the treatment doesn't work, the patient is a fool and wasted his money. No one wants to be thought of as a fool even by himself, so the patient will believe the treatment worked and his/her imagination will fill in the gaps.
Another aspect to this is good old fashioned Western (particularly American) racism, ignorance and cultural imperialism. Since the "medicine" is coming from an almond-eyed gentleman with darker skin, a thick accent and with office decor written in strange foreign characters, it's "different" and "exotic," so by extension it has to be "cool" and thus must be effective.
Finally, there's a much simpler aspect. A sick person who feels like traditional medicine has failed him/her visits a TCM practitioner. Generally speaking, said TCM practitioner is a kindly gent with a grandfatherly demeanour who looks and sounds like Mr. Miyagi (see above re: "exotic"). Said gent listens to the patient unhurriedly and may genuinely want to help and may genuinely believes that what he has to offer will help. Anyone would feel somewhat better in that situation and that temporary relief is enough to make people want to come back for more and to shell out more of their money.
The trouble with this, of course, is that people will continually seek the temporary succor provided by the quacks while delaying or avoiding those who can actually treat the underlying problem. This can cause the underlying problem, particularly something like cancer, to move from the treatable stages to the untreatable.