Does Acupuncture Work even when the Acupuncture Needles are put

Does Acupuncture Work even when the Acupuncture Needles are put in all Wrong?

Here is the thing about the way medical science does seek and find its knowledge - it will arrive at and accept a finding as the truth even if the truth unacceptable in every other way and it is unpleasant.To all those who swear by the relief there is to be had from chronic back pain in submitting to acupuncture needles, science does not really disagree; there is only one little problem - they find that getting the acupuncture needles in all the wrong places achieve the same results too. This was what they found in a German study published several months ago in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. As usual, the study they undertook used placebos - you know, where they tell a trial subject that they are receiving the real treatment, when in fact they just receive fake treatment, pills and all.

In this study, they had a group of patients who got real acupuncture and one that did not. Acupuncture needles were inserted deep into the skin at precise locations that were known to have an effect on vital nerve junctions. The needles were then manipulated to create de qi - that familiar sensation of a kind of flowing numbness. The effects were recorded.Then,there was the other unlucky group that was told that it would be given acupuncture, but was only given an elaborate show of acupuncture needles being inserted into the skin. The needles went in at all the wrong places, with no manipulation, and certainly not deep enough to do any good.

The doctors kept in touch with their patients to find out how their treatment (or their fake treatment as the case may be) was working for them. They found that only one out of four patients who received the conventional treatment reported an improvement. But surprise! surprise! the group that received the real acupuncture and the groups that received the fake acupuncture both reported equally great results. It didn't seem to matter that the acupuncture needles in the fake group had been inserted at all the wrong places and had had no manipulation done to them - relieved they were of their pain. They needed far less pain medication after that. However, once enough time had gone by that the effects of the acupuncture (real or fake) had to wear off, far more in the sham group asked for pain medication over and above the fake acupuncture than did the people who received the real acupuncture.

So what did they learn from all this - do the researchers feel now that all the acupuncture with all the fancy acupuncture needles are all just messing with your brain to achieve their effects? Not exactly. They wonder if they haven't quite understood yet how acupuncture does achieve the results it does. Perhaps they feel, acupuncture works, but for no known reason. Or maybe people believe in acupuncture so much, that the placebo effect is impossibly great. It was the insurance companies that ordered this research. Perhaps they hoped to find that acupuncture was not scientific enough that they would need to pay for it?