Gimme Some of that Placebo Acupuncture Because My Back Is Killing Me
Nick Gillespie | September 25, 2007, 2:51pm
A new study suggests that acupuncture--even fake acupuncture--does a better job of curing back problems than "conventional therapy":
Dr. Michael Haake of the University of Regensburg in Germany looked at 1,162 patients who had experienced chronic low back pain for an average of eight years. They ruled out people with back pain caused by spinal fractures, tumours, scoliosis or pregnancy.
On[e] third of the patients underwent twice a week 30-minute sessions of real acupuncture; another third received fake acupuncture; and the final third received conventional therapy.
The real acupuncture was based on Chinese medicine that targets traditional acupuncture points or meridians. In the fake acupuncture, the needles were not placed as deeply as the real thing and avoided meridian points. Those getting conventional therapy were prescribed a combination of medication, physical therapy and exercise.
After six months, patients were asked about their pain and functional ability. In the real acupuncture group, 47.6 per cent of patients said their condition improved. In the sham acupuncture group, 44.2 per cent did. In the conventional care group, 27.4 per cent described experiencing relief.
More here.
Some caveats: It's not clear what "conventional care" consisted of and there doesn't seem to have been a control group that received no treatment either.
reason looked at Harvard's attempts to legitimate complementary and alternative medicine here. and we looked at the bloody crossroads where chiropractors and the Federal Trade Commission collided here.
Neu Mejican | September 25, 2007, 5:15pm | #
There is a lot of interesting research on the Placebo effect that might weaken Shannon Love's interpretation of the results here...an example...
BMJ 2005;330:1202-1205 (21 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7501.1202
Education and debate
Characteristic and incidental (placebo) effects in complex interventions such as acupuncture
Charlotte Paterson,
Paul Dieppe
The specific effects of non-pharmaceutical treatments are not always divisible from placebo effects and may be missed in randomised trials
The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.
Introduction
The randomised double blind controlled trial has proved an invaluable tool for testing the efficacy of new drugs. However, it is now used to evaluate complex non-pharmaceutical interventions, many of which are based on different therapeutic theories. For example, randomised controlled trials are used to test physiotherapy, a complex intervention with a basis in biomedical theory, and acupuncture, which is often based on Chinese medicine. In order to use a placebo or sham controlled design, an intervention has to be divided into characteristic (specific) and incidental (placebo, non-specific) elements. However, recent research suggests that it is not meaningful to split complex interventions into characteristic and incidental elements. Elements that are categorised as incidental in drug trials may be integral to non-pharmaceutical interventions. If this is true, the use of placebo or sham controlled trial designs in evaluating complex non-pharmaceutical interventions may generate false negative results.
Another interesting article
Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain
Tor D. Wager,1*{dagger} James K. Rilling,2 Edward E. Smith,1 Alex Sokolik,3 Kenneth L. Casey,3 Richard J. Davidson,4 Stephen M. Kosslyn,5 Robert M. Rose,6 Jonathan D. Cohen2,7
The experience of pain arises from both physiological and psychological factors, including one's beliefs and expectations. Thus, placebo treatments that have no intrinsic pharmacological effects may produce analgesia by altering expectations. However, controversy exists regarding whether placebos alter sensory pain transmission, pain affect, or simply produce compliance with the suggestions of investigators. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we found that placebo analgesia was related to decreased brain activity in pain-sensitive brain regions, including the thalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, and was associated with increased activity during anticipation of pain in the prefrontal cortex, providing evidence that placebos alter the experience of pain.
