[ryanmarsh]

A couple of years ago I slipped (herniated) two lumbar disks. Both of the surgeons I consulted begged me NOT to get surgery (one with tears in his eyes). I'm ever so grateful that there are surgeons out there who will push back. Contrast that with when I went to an orthopedic specialist about knee pain from running. In less than two minutes of consultation he told me he wanted to snip my tight IT bands. My jaw was on the floor. I was nothing but meat and a paycheck.

Thankfully acupuncture has given me back the ability to sit/run/lift/stand. I'm so grateful I didn't get surgery in either case.

[sosuke]

Acupuncture, there has been so much FUD spread about alternative medicine that I have no idea what to trust anymore. It isn't even covered by most insurance.

What is real, who to trust.

[DanBC]

You can look at sites like the Cochrane Collaboration or NICE.

Cochrane provide meta-analysis of various treatments. The meta review include a good summary of the paper. Here's their list of stuff about acupuncture: http://www.cochrane.org/search/site/acupuncture

NICE reviews evidence of safety and efficacy to try to decide if the English NHS should offer (and thus pay for) a treatment. Nice will sometimes say "do this", sometimes they'll say "we don't have enough evidence to say either way", and sometimes they'll say "do not do". If they recommend to not do something it's because they have plenty of evidence of harm. Here's their list of stuff about acupuncture (a lot of which is of the "do not do" recommendation): http://www.nice.org.uk/search?q=acupucture

England is also introducing "personal health budgets" for people with long term conditions. This is a small pot of money that the patient can spend pretty much how they wish (not on debt, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, or anything illegal) so long as they can persuade a panel. This could include homeopathy or acupuncture. For example: Imagine a person who is frequently and severely self-harming. (They attend emergency department every week, and they're usually admitted from ED into hospital for surgery.) This person may feel that a joining a 5-a-side soccer club and getting acupuncture would help reduce either the frequency or severity of their self harm. http://www.nhs.uk/choiceintheNHS/Yourchoices/personal-health... https://www.england.nhs.uk/healthbudgets/

[raverbashing]

The NICE results are interesting:

"Do not use acupuncture to treat hyperbilirubinaemia", "Do not offer acupuncture for treating lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in men.", "Acupuncture is not recommended for the management of otitis media with effusion (OME)."

But it is an option for low back pain https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg88/chapter/1-guidance

[ploxiln]

Acupuncture is a very effective placebo (because you can really feel it working). There's a whole complex theory about points all over the body which affect ailments in different parts of the body, also based on personality type, but (of course!) none of it matters. Carefully poke someone with needles anywhere (and pretend there's some meaning behind the placement) and the effect is the same.

The big give-away that a treatment is just a convincing placebo is that it claims to help with everything.

[ryanmarsh]

> Carefully poke someone with needles anywhere (and pretend there's some meaning behind the placement) and the effect is the same.

Citation needed.

[ploxiln]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250001

"Sham acupuncture may be as efficacious as true acupuncture: a systematic review of clinical trials"

[ryanmarsh]

I tried accupuncture last, I should have tried it first. I love how western medicine calls any mechanism it doesn't understand "placebo" (reference to child comment) or "psychosomatic". Acupuncture worked for me after I exhausted everything western medicine had to offer (short of surgery). I had serious injuries (MRI showed this). I had verified radiating nerve pain, tests showed the nerves were innervated (activated) by these injuries to the spine. Acupuncture did what steroids, gabba blockers, physical therapy, et.al. could not.

Western medicine has some amazing things to offer for serious conditions. Its really silly how most other ailments are covered by crap in the drug store. I say crap because after my wife started treating the family with essential oils, and my acupuncturist's herbal remedies I'm sick less often and recover faster. I even avoided having to have my gallbladder removed. On fucking herbs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Do I know why all these organic compounds and odd treatments work? Does that mean they don't? Does it mean it's all psychosomatic? sigh Maybe, just maybe people in the east figured out a system for treating many ailments. Maybe western medicine needs to zoom out from the molecule and start looking at the whole patient.

You want a lesson in the limits of western medicine? Watch your child die slowly of cancer. Losing my daughter disabused me of any fantasies of cures just around the corner. Meanwhile top doctors kept saying "we've never seen this before". Western medicine doesn't have answers for half of what people think it does. This isn't CSI. Humble out. If some herbs and acupuncture can heal people then deal with it.

[dang]

I'm so sorry you lost your daughter.

[icegreentea]

Well, the fun part about acupuncture is this that all the studies that 'disprove' acupuncture are disproving very specific things. Specifically, they show that 'traditional chinese acupencture' with the whole crap about chi and meridians and whatever are not significantly different from the control treatment.

The control treatment is typically use of acupuncture needles in areas not specifically specified by codified acupuncture standards (it is a thing... you can go to school for this stuff remember), or the use of sham needles, which still penetrate by like half a inch or something.

All most of the studies you will find that both arms (control and 'real' acupuncture) both show similar improvements in outcome. A valid (and I think the right one) conclusion to draw from these studies is that while the internal logic of acupuncture doesn't do anything, the mechanical action of poking needles into the body has non-trivial benefits.

If you can't get acupuncture covered by insurance, you can look into dry needling (its mechanically the same thing...). A quick google search tells me that some states will allow chiropractors and physiotherapists to perform dry needling and may fall under different insurance buckets.

edit: sorry, I forgot to add this in. obviously poking needles into muscles won't do anything for stuff that isn't rooted in muscles/other connective tissue. Won't do shit for your asthma or allergies for example...

[mjevans]

Trust results. For some people the best medicine is guided by some change from within. I believe that as far as positive outcomes are concerned (ruling out helpful communities and other factors) the actual reason that placebos and that any organized system of belief work for some people is the same. They want to, and believe that they will, get better; thus they do, or at least they learn to cope. It's pretty much a psychological solution.

You can talk your way out of some problems; but not all problems. Some things require physical changes driven by external (alien to the self) forces.

[_0w8t]

Acupuncture does not need even to have an effect of placebo to be helpful.

One benefits from anything that at worst can bring very little harm if it keeps the person from a surgery with a small upside at best but that can potentially bring a lot of harm through post-operational complications.

[maccard]

I had a herniated disc - incredibly painful and it had terrible affects on my mood and my weight as well. I found that most of the effective treatments were ones that put me in a better mental state even if they had no effect on the pain. As someone else said; trust results!

[threeseed]

The problem is that due to the placebo effect you will never know what is real or not. That said I would suspect that a lot of alternative medicines have therepeutic benefits. We just don't know why or how.

[hollander]

Don't trust it, try it. If it works for you, it works. If not, try somewhere else. I've tried ayurveda, which even doesn't use needles, just some weird hippie waving with hands above me, not even touching me, and nothing else has give me so much energy back in a period when my energy was really low. I've tried acupuncture then as well, and various other alternative techniques. Most of them were very relaxing, like a day in a spa, and a day later the effect was gone.

I've tried to analyse what the therapist did, but couldn't explain it. The only - off the chart - explanation is that everything is energy, and that we have energy outside our body boundaries that can influence our well being. I'm pretty down to earth. I've met enough people who worship these alternative methods, and I don't. But if it works, it works, and I will use it.

So maybe this is not promoting acupuncture, but I'm just saying that these alternative methods can do stuff to me - but maybe not to you - and modern medicine cannot explain it. Acupuncture may work like this in another situation and for other persons.

Then there is another big thing regarding acupuncture, and that is holism, which makes the acupuncturist look at the whole picture, all your problems, qualities, strenghts and weaknesses.