Consumer Reports Promotes Woo Again.

[HuckleB]

Acupuncture and Endorphins: Not all that Impressive
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/acupuncture-and-endorphins-not-all-that-impressive/

"...

Does acupuncture release feel-good hormones called endorphins? It is a bad question since, as is so often the case, exactly what is meant by acupuncture is never specified.

For electro, a tarted up a form of TENS, the answer is often a yes, but electro-acupuncture isn’t acupuncture. Of the dozens and dozens and dozens of forms of what passes for acupuncture only electro acupuncture uses electricity. I know. Duh

All the other forms of acupunctures? Almost all of the data suggests that for the more traditional forms of acupuncture, feel-good hormones have nothing to do with its alleged analgesic effects. That effect, as we know, is actually the same mechanism as beer goggles.

Given how totally picky CR is in their product reviews, it is odd they did not bother to investigate the basis of the idea that ‘acupuncture’ releases feel-good hormones, it is electricity. Yet another fail when CR accepts the standard mythical narrative of acupuncture without actually reviewing the supporting information and then giving terrible advice. But that is the standard approach to reporting SCAM. Same as it ever was. I do wonder if I can actually trust their advice on the best car or laundry detergent when they have such a fail with health care, a topic far more important."


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On the pointlessness of acupuncture in the emergency room…or anywhere else
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/on-the-pointlessness-of-acupuncture-in-the-emergency-room-or-anywhere-else/

"...

Enter emergency acupuncture. No, I’m not kidding you. Instead of battlefield acupuncture, which is helping to pave the way for acupuncture to infiltrate the VA Medical Center system, here we have a clinical study examining the use of acupuncture in the emergency room, published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, entitled “Acupuncture versus intravenous morphine in the management of acute pain in the emergency department.” No, I kid you not. Click on the link if you don’t believe me. This is a clinical trial randomizing people with acute pain to acupuncture versus intravenous morphine. Its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier is NCT02460913.

Let’s take a look at this study.

It is a phase 2 clinical trial that randomizes patients in the emergency room with acute pain to either titration of intravenous morphine or acupuncture. As you can probably imagine, it is completely unblinded. There is no sham, nor is there even an attempt at blinding. Given that, I bet you can guess the result before I even describe the study in more detail, because the results of such a study are very predictable. Let’s move on, anyway.

...

So basically acupuncturists could choose any points they wished. Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, acupuncture “works” (i.e., produces placebo effects) whether you put the needles into the “right” points or not. It doesn’t even matter if you actually insert the needles, as long as you touch the skin (even with toothpicks instead of needles)! Be that as it may, there was not even an attempt to include a sham acupuncture group.

...

Also, there is a big problem with the reporting of this clinical trial, so much so that I’m surprised this journal published it. There is no CONSORT flow diagram to show allocation of subjects, dropout rates, and analysis. Indeed, seeing a clinical trial in which there are exactly 150 subjects in each arm always makes my skeptical antennae start twitching. No one dropped out of the study? No one was randomized but decided not to go through with the trial? I suppose it’s possible for a short term intervention in the ER, but consider this: Accrual was exactly perfect for each group. This almost never happens in a clinical trial.

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Is there any place for acupuncture in 21st century medical practice?
http://www.scienceinmedicine.org.au/images/pdf/acupuncturereview.pdf

"Acupuncture is an integral part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Over the past few decades, acupuncture has become popular in a number of countries as a stand-alone intervention. As part of TCM, acupuncture needs to be considered as a pre-scientific modality, and, as such, unlikely to be accepted by global modern medical science. As a separate technique it has received much attention. However, after much promise and extensive investigation, it is now becoming clear that there is no evidence based support for its use in modern medicine. This paper examines the evidence for this conclusion. Acupuncture is examined as a part of TCM and the results of research studies asking if acupuncture has the potential for contributing to modern scientific medicine are reviewed.

...

The World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed acupuncture, but challenged by evidence from the Cochrane Collaborative has taken down their website on acupuncture which had suggested effectiveness in more than 100 conditions. Cochrane emphasized that where acupuncture appeared to be effective, the studies were of poor quality (often with no sham acupuncture control group), and the evidence was weak. When studies included sham acupuncture, both true acupuncture and sham acupuncture groups had similarly positive results, indicating that they were measuring simply a placebo effect. And for many of the conditions being treated, there was no relevant published research at all.

The US Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy issued a position paper on acupuncture in 2010. It concluded that recent research had unraveled nearly all acupuncture claims and noted, “The bulk of recent research strongly tends towards the hypothesis that acupuncture's positive effects are mainly due to a built-in expectation...”

A 2006 review in The Medical Letter stated that “Acupuncture alone has not been shown in rigorous, duplicated studies to benefit any defined medical condition”.

In their book Trick or Treatment, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst concluded that there was only “tentative” evidence that acupuncture “might” be effective for some forms of pain relief and nausea, that it failed to deliver benefits for any other conditions, and that its underlying concepts were meaningless.

..."


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Alas, we live in a fiction-based world.