Acupuncture
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Acupuncture is a form of medicine based on sticking needles into people. Acupuncture is often described as "gateway woo"[1] because of the increasing amount of scientists and medical centers accepting it a respectable treatment.
While many doctors don't believe in chi or meridians, it is widely believed that acupuncture is more effective than a placebo. The needles bit might, it seems, do more than nothing.
Contents |
Technique
Its theoretical basis is that health and sickness are caused by the good or bad flow of chi through the body, in particular along the twelve major meridians of the body (though some authorities list fourteen or even more) which run from head to toe along the body, and which are associated with the bladder, gallbladder, heart, large intestine, small intestine, kidneys, liver, lungs, spleen, stomach, pericardium, and "triple heater". It is necessary to translate this last term word for word from the Chinese because there is no such thing as the "triple heater".
The acupuncturist treats the ailments of these various parts by inserting needles at points lying on these meridians, known simply as "acupuncture points" and manipulating the needles to increase or decrease the flow of chi along that meridian.
Variants on acupuncture include auricular acupuncture, which involves sticking needles into particular parts of the outer ear, which supposedly correspond to different body parts (essentially reflexology with ears instead of feet); electroacupuncture, in which the needle carries a small electric current; and moxibustion, in which moxa (the plant commonly known as mugwort, Artemesia vulgaris) is set smouldering on the appropriate acupuncture point.
Origins
Unlike many remedies which appeal to the New Age, acupuncture is genuinely ancient and genuinely Oriental. The earliest surviving text dealing with acupuncture is the Chinese text The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, dating from about 300 BC.
Acupuncture lost ground in China from the seventeenth century onwards, with the introduction of Western scientific ideas. It regained some of its prestige during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, and is widely practiced in modern China. It became popular in the West from the 1960s onwards.
Although the basics of acupuncture have remained the same since ancient times, the system has suffered the inevitable mutations and accretions: the original system, for example, had 365 acupuncture points: some modern systems catalog as many as 2000.
Efficacy
Sticking needles into people can cause the release into the bloodstream of endorphins and natural steroids such as cortisol. The medical version of this is called intramuscular stimulation and is of some use in the management of chronic pain. Acupuncture, to the extent it works, seems to do so in this manner. The pain relief from acupuncture seems to be mediated solely through the release of endorphins, as any perceived analgesic effect is reduced or eliminated when the patient has been pretreated with an opioid antagonist such as naloxone.[2]
As to the wider claims of acupuncturists, it seems on the face of it unlikely, given the unscientific basis of their claims, that they can have much effect on a patient's physiology by manipulating the flow of a non-existent substance around imaginary meridians.
However, a recent study using an MRI to view brain activity during an acupuncture session found that specific acupuncture points have distinct effects on cerebral activity in specific areas that are not otherwise predictable anatomically.[3]
It is noticeable that acupuncturists tend chiefly to advertise their abilities to treat precisely those ailments which are chronic but intermittently better or worse (headaches, acne), or which have a strong psychosomatic element (impotence, asthma), or which are guaranteed to clear up rapidly anyway (the common cold), and are therefore are profiting from the placebo effect and regression to the mean.[4]
It has also been found that far from curing disease, acupuncture has been a transmission agent for hepatitis C, MRSA, Staphylococcus aureus and acupuncture mycobacteriosis[5].
See also
Footnotes
- ↑ http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/11/thatll_teach_em_for_using_an_actual_vali.php
- ↑ "Interaction of diazepam and naloxone on acupuncture induced pain relief" - Eriksson SV, Lundeberg T, Lundeberg S. 1991
- ↑ http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/2/3/315
- ↑ Probably unwittingly so.
- ↑ British Medical Journal: Acupuncture transmitted infections, (Patrick Woo [sic] et al.) - BMJ 2010; 340:c1268