Welcome & Roll Call

Hey cool-hello all! Well, I am actually a new grad RN (4 months in) and working at UCSF on their pancreas/kidney/liver transplant floor. Quite the handful for any nurse, but for a new grad......

Anyway, I love the 12 hour shifts as I only work three days a week and can spend the rest of the week working on my belly dancing and just having fun. I find the most difficult part is not the practice itself, but the rotating shifts...on nights for two months starting next week-ugh! Nice to meet you all!

Yeah, way to fly off the handle there Richard. If it bothers you that much, go read the study and let me know what your criticism of it is. I found it quite sound, but perhaps you can find a fatal flaw in it.

Unfortunately no double-blinded scientific study that has proper control procedures has shown any benefit to acupuncture outside of placebo. If you have found one that does, please post it. I'd love to read it.

Thanks. ;-)


Greg said: "An open minded physician uses all treatment modalities that can be demonstrated to be effective in a controlled setting. "

I agree 100%. Whether it's "traditional" or modern medicine, if it is scientifically proven to work, a doctor or caregiver *with the patient's best interests at heart* will use it. If it doesn't work, they won't use it.

Sorry for the defensive stance. I didn't quite expect to be, well, attacked isn't the right word, because it wasn't too much of an attack, and I'm not really sure what the right word is for the response to my introducing myself to the group, but it wasn't friendly, and that came as a bit of a shock to me.

As to the JAMA article, it's 12.00 just to download it off of their site since I'm not a subscriber. If you or anyone has access to it and would like to email it to me, I'd be happy to review it. That said, from the news articles I've seen, and knowing how acupuncture is tested, here are my concerns:

1. How were the "real" acupuncture points chosen? From a book or by a careful analysis of the patient's condition and constitution using all of the traditional diagnosis methods of traditional Chinese medicine? My guess would be that they were the same points chosen out of a book for each patient.

2. Who inserted the needles? The summaries I've read said that they were put in by specially trained physicians. How were they trained? Did the people who inserted the needles know proper techniques of tonification and sedation? Were those techniques even used? Did the specially trained physicians putting in the real acupuncture points choose which points to use, or were they just inserting them off of a list (similar to question #1).

3. How were the sham points chosen? I shall have to assume that they were inserted by people who knew nothing about acupuncture, otherwise it would not be double blind.

4. Did the points remain constant from treatment to treatment? This would likely never occur with a fully educated acupuncture physician (or practitioner, depending on what state or country you live in).

By the way, there are literally tens of thousands of published studies on acupuncture out there, both on humans and on animals. If interested, check out the National Library of Medicine's website and search engines. Enough reading to keep a person busy for ages.

I personally do believe it would be difficult to impossible to really test acupuncture via DBPCS's. It is a powerful enough technique that even sham acupuncture can be somewhat effective, as this article shows. One summary I saw said it was as effective as Rx med's for migraines. So again, the question has to be how were the points chosen? If from a book, if consistant from patient to patient and from treatment to treatment, it wasn't traditional acupuncture that was being studied.

I know, I know, it's anecdotal, but I've treated dozens upon dozens of people with severe and frequent migraine headaches who, after a course of treatments, never or very very rarely ever had another migraine. Each treatment, from the first one to the last one was unique. Each carefully chosen to address the patients condition at the moment of treatment. Each treatment built upon the previous treatment. The results, again, throw anecdotal at me is you will, I greatfully accept it, were stunning and changed people's lives.

Frankly, I don't care if it was placebo, though I have yet to hear anyone explain why getting a treatment that they didn't believe in and were going to as a last chance would create a greater placebo effect than all of the western meds that they took that they did believe would help, and simply didn't. And again, all I care about is getting my patients well, functional, and happy. It's what I do.

I'm happy to discuss this, but if it turns into flaming, I really don't have the time for it, and I will quietly leave this tribe.