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Even fake acupuncture helps back pain

Posted on Sep 24th 2007 7:00PM by Bethany Sanders

Filed Under: Diet & Weight Loss, Alternative & Green Health

No one seems to understand why, but a recent study found that acupuncture -- even when it's done incorrectly -- works better than conventional medicine for treating chronic back pain. Researchers theorize that having a competing stimuli confuses pain signals to the brain and relieves pain, or that having a positive outlook about the benefits of acupuncture may have created a placebo effect. Whatever the reason, actual acupuncture improved back pain in nearly half the group and the "sham" version of acupuncture did nearly as well. Conventional treatment only helped about 27% of patients. Interesting. Anyone out there who's schooled in acupuncture willing to share their ideas on why this works?

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Tags: acupuncture, alternative pain treatments, AlternativePainTreatments, back pain, BackPain

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

kpluck 9-24-2007 @ 7:35PM

The reason "fake" and "real" acupuncture have about same effectiveness is because in both cases the only thing at work is the placebo effect.

mike 9-26-2007 @ 1:45PM

have these scientists ever heard of accupressure, hello?! and if it's the placebo effect, why does it work on animals?

oran kivity 11-25-2007 @ 11:30PM

The reason that sham acupuncture works as well as inserted needling is that it's not sham. Most people believe that to be acupuncture a needle must penetrate the skin but there are entire schools of acupuncture, for example, Toyohari in Japan (do a search on toyohari or 'touch needling') where the needle is never inserted, merely touched to the skin. This is exactly what happens in sham acupuncture. The needle tip touches the skin. So in fact the trial compared two methods of needling with a control group and both insertive and non-insertive needling proved effective.

For more details on experiments with 'vector properties' of needles, which demonstrate that a stainless steel needle can have an effect merely when held near a meridian, see appendix on Sayoshi in Chasing the Dragon’s Tail, Manaka Y., Itaya K., Birch S., Paradigm, USA, 1995,