Acupunture - pseudoscience?

[Anomalocaris]

1. What makes you think it is pseudoscience?
2. If it is pseudoscience, how does it help people?

This is my area. Yes it is a pseudomedicine. Just like chiropractic. It's based on a flawed idea about what causes disease.

The four most prominent academic journals in biomedicine are Lancet, BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, and New England Journal of Medicine. If there is good evidence for it it will be published in one of those Journals, or in another respected Journal. You can search the PubMed database at your leisure. Better yet, there are 144 Cochrane reviews (well 144 that have been published, some of those will be updated reviews of past reviews) and an overview of them up to Sep 2007 was published here. In the overview you will notice that the vast majority of reviews did not find that acupuncture works, and those that did likely suffered from publication bias.


How does it help people? It doesn't. It provides the placebo effect and that's all. But people still experience the placebo benefits when taking actual evidence-based treatments.

Now I'm not saying that everything that has a "lack of evidence" is not worth consideration. I had to look at Pickle Juice earlier in the year, and whether or not it is suitable to be used an an ergonomic aid in sports. Benefits are that athletes like it, that it's unlikely to cause any harm, and that it's a food so there's no need to get special approval to take it. So until it is shown not to work there's really no reason not to use it if desired, so long as it doesn't impede other treatments. There's a review of evidence for treatment of sports-related muscle cramps here, and I know you can't read the full article but I have and it does say that PJ is a promising treatment that needs further study - and in fact the only treatment option that is shown to work is stretching at this time. The other treatment options like taping and massage therapy have not been shown to work either.

But in the case of acupuncture we know that it doesn't work. It's not that there's not enough evidence - it's that the body of evidence shows it does not cure any illnesses.

Evidence does not show acupuncture cures anything.

However, body of evidence shows acupuncture needles as applied to traditional acupuncture pressure points has some palliative and analgesic effect.  The fact that it doesn't seem to work as well when randomly applied, even on patients who has no idea where acupuncture pressure points are, suggest it is not quite a placebo affect.   It is also not so far fetched, as mere pressure on many of these points also seem to have analgesic effects, something which skilled masseuse takes advantage of.

Also, the pressure points associated acupuncture appears to not have been a unique Chinese or East Asian invention. Otzi, the 5300 year old mummy recovered from an Austrian glacier high in the Alps, has a pattern of tattoos on the body and limbs that match traditional Chinese acupuncture points.  This mummy is far older than the oldest evidence of the practice of acupuncture in china.  

This could mean acupuncture pressure points had been a widespread tradition prevailing throughout pre-bronze age Eurasia, but the tradition had since been lost everywhere except in east Asia.  Widespread tradition doesn't mean it's not bullshit, of course, much as widespread tradition of the constellations doesn't mean the three prominent stars of the Orion is actually the apotheosis of the hunter's belt.

However, alternatively, but not mutually exclusively, the acupuncture points could have been subject to Independent discovery at different locations and different times, something which a true piece of total bullshit is not likely to do.