On May 29, 4:52 pm, The One True Zhen Jue <Andrew_King...@yahoo.com>
wrote:
...

The One True Zhen Jue we are all in your debt
for a series of BRILLIANT postings on Acupuncture
bringing everyone up to date
on the remarkable successes of Acupuncture
and its now open utilization and acceptance
by standard medicine.

And you have in addition provided
us with the perfect endquote
for responses to Aunties
who look askance
at any development
which threatens their closed
minded and carefully protected
misconceptions.
I shall use it in future
postings.

thanks
Citizen Jimserac

This article begins with "Acupuncture gains acceptance in U.S.
children’s hospitals".  But hey, this was an article from 2003.  That
was nearly 5 years ago.  In that same year, Richard Schultz expressed
his heartfelt conviction to the contrary and wrote "...what is well
known is that acupuncture does not work."  What is well known about
science is that over time, what is accepted changes as our awareness
grows.  While some folks are reluctant to accept facts outside of
their chosen belief system, I'll leave no child behind, not even the
contrary one.

PM What should be well known is that it works, to the extent that it works,
mainly as placebo and nothing in this proves otherwise.

Before you get too  excited about universities teaching acuouncture, you
should look at the company acupuncture now keeps.  Stanford university is
also investigating therapeutic touch (now often called "healing touch"), a
method that is  obviously a placebo and based upon completely unfounded
medical beliefs.  It is being studied for its potential with patient
well-being and symptom relief.     CAM is, in fact,  quite fashionable now
within sections of conventional medicine,  with over 50% of British GPs
using homoepathy and 30-40% of Australian GPs using one form of alternative
medicine or other.

But what does it all mean?   It doesn't necessarily mean the endorsemnet of
Chinese mysticism or the existence of human energy fields or other
completely unfounded  ideas.  . I  think doctors are beginning to recognise
that they do not have simple, entirely safe and 100% reiable solutions for
all of mankinds ills, and that there are situations where ant harmless
placebo may be the preferred option.  There is thus  a bit of a reaction to
the use of powerful and risky pharmaceuticals, at least for minor and
self-limiting complaints.  Even cancer pateints may be made to feel better
by methods that have no direct effect on symptoms or upon cancer itself.

I spend part of my time trying to get fellow skeptics to understand the
complexities of medical practice and that there are areas of it that do not
lend themselves to hard and fast rules..  I sent the follwing to a sceptical
blog only yesterday defending the use of acupuncture by a group of
neurologists treating sciatica.

Quote---
Re the sciatica anecdote — since sciatica will mostly settle spontaneously
with time, and a major objective of its management is to avoid subjecting
patients to invasive procedures unnecessarily, it is very reasonable to ask
why acupuncture cannot be offered to consenting patients whose pain is
proving difficult to control.

Doing so does not have to be seen as an endorsement of either Chinese
mysticism or the various tentative scientific explanations that have been
put forward to explain apparent placebo activity. It could be good,
sensible, knowing, ,old-fashioned, medical pragmatism — a preparedness to
use any tools that might help achieve the ends desired for and by the
patient.

Some sceptics lament on this blog that nearly everyone else seems blind to
the "truth" about alternative methods. So do I, overall, but we are working
from very specific personal conceptions of what truths are important and
even those which are "scientific" without acknowledging that. Some of the
doctors we despise for not sharing our views may sense this but, like me,
have difficulty in articulating the exact problem, without sounding like an
unscientific, New Age jerk.

The important truth in the present instance might well be that acupuncture
helps the neurologists with a common problem.  At the very least acupuncture
will sometimes buy doctors more time for conservative measures to take
effect.  It can be confidently predicted to distract some patients
temporarily from their pain. On top of that will be placebo reactions that
some here may argue are not worth considering, but which can by no means be
discounted on the available scientific evidence. Even the often quoted
Hrobjartsson study that supposedly refutes the existence of significant
placebo effects shows an mean effect size for placebo upon pain that
approaches that generally regarded as "moderate".

Those bothered by the ethics of using an unproven or predominantly placebo
treatment like acupuncture should also note that Cochrane is less than
enthusiastic about the effectiveness of discectomy.

I am not in this challenging the underlying wisdom of the sceptical position
on most matters.  It is just that good medicine is very complicated,
intensely pragmatic and more to do with getting patients better in the
simplest and safest ways possible than it is about satisfying carefully
selected ethical and scientific niceties. If that sounds paternal, so be it.
It is equally paternal and probably also arguably equally unethical to use
matters irrelevant to the individual patient’s welfare to deny them
treatments that might help.

PM

It is now 2008.  Today, Stanford has a fellowship which teachs MD's to
perform acupuncture for pediatric anthesesia.  Of course, it isn't
limited to pediatric anesthesia, fellows may elect to specialize in
adult anesthesia.  The number of hospitals offering acupuncture to
patients in general, and children in particular has grown.  Major,
prestegious medical universities are training MD's to perform
acupuncture in the schools' hospitals and affliated clinics.  Often,
those teaching them how to become better physicians are non-MD
licensed acupuncturists (LAc).

Acupuncture is being taught within conventional medicine by MD's (and
LAc's) to MD's to practice it.  They do so within the university
hospitals and their own private practices.  This is becoming
increasingly commonplace.  We see more universities offering it and
more MD's learning and practicing it.  At Harvard, they are also
teaching them to use some Oriental medical diagnostics.

Perhaps, that is why, after 10 months of disputing the bloody obvious,
Richard has had an epiphany and wrote "You have succeeded in showing
that acupuncture as a treatment is accepted
by far more people within mainstream medicine than I would have
thought possible."  _Now_ he knows what the bard, (possibly a crypto-
acupuncturist) meant when he wrote "There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Sure, growth can be painful, especially when one realizes he has made
a substantial investment in championing a bad cause.  But, embracing
acupuncture in particular, like embracing truth in general, makes so
many things in life better.  For the future, I respectfully recommend
to him that he use critical thinking instead of blindly clinging to
his dogmatic prejudices.  It would be a shame for him to wait another
10 months before accepting this truth AND the better life that comes
with that acceptance.

http://med.stanford.edu/anesthesia/education/clinical_fellowship.html

http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2003fall/prickled.html

Acupuncture gains acceptance in U.S. children’s hospitals

By Sara Solovitch
Illustration by Jessie Hartland

A nurse’s assistant sits outside the open doorway. Her job is to keep
watch over the girl on the bed. The girl is 16 but she looks 40.
Pockets of loose skin hang over her eyes. She weighs 76 pounds and, if
left on her own, will starve herself to death.

Brenda Golianu, MD, a Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
anesthesiologist trained in acupuncture, darkens the room and waits
for the girl to roll up her pink pajama bottoms and make herself
comfortable on the air mattress.

Anorexia has left her with abdominal pain and severe headaches.
Acupuncture relieves both symptoms.
“Take a deep breath in,” Golianu instructs, then eases a small,
transparent acupuncture needle just below a bony knee. “If it causes a
little bit of aching, that’s OK. If it causes a sharp pain, I want you
to tell me and I’ll take it out.”

She slips another needle behind the other knee, then one in each foot,
thumb and wrist. Within seconds, the girl is sleeping. Her narrow
chest rises and falls rhythmically while Golianu waits beside her in
the darkness and watches the monitor. When the respiratory rate falls
to eight breaths a minute, she nods, satisfied. It’s an indicator of
profound relaxation.

Golianu, a Stanford assistant professor of anesthesia, was an
undergraduate at MIT doing her junior year abroad in China when she
first observed acupuncture at work. She later traveled to Taiwan,
spent several months observing acupuncture at the Chinese Medical
College there and then studied it in a clinic in Japan. But it was
during her residency at Stanford that she became convinced of its
benefits.

“There were patients in the pain clinic for whom nothing seemed to
work,” she says. “Medications were of no significant benefit. It was
very frustrating.”

In the past 10 years, acupuncture has made its way into a growing
number of major children’s hospitals – including Packard Children’s
Hospital and Children’s Hospital Boston, where doctors use it to wean
babies off opiate medicines, ease the pain of rheumatoid arthritis and
reduce nausea from chemotherapy.

More than a third of all pain treatment centers in the United States
offer it as therapy and an estimated 3,500 physicians have acupuncture
credentials — using it to treat everything from heroin addiction to
low back pain and postoperative surgery pain.

Good points
Acupuncture offers pain relief
Not long ago most U.S. caregivers placed acupuncture on the far side
of alternative medicine. Times have changed. Now many hospital-based
pain and palliative care centers recommend acupuncture for a wide
range of common problems, including:

• Abdominal pain
• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• Dental pain
• Fibromyalgia
• Hip pain
• Lower back pain
• Menstrual cramps
• Migraine headaches
• Myofascial pain
• Nausea from chemo- therapy
• Postoperative surgical pain
• Tennis elbow

“There has been an explosion of interest in the hospital setting over
the last five or six years,” says James Dowden,executive administrator
of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture.

The centuries-old Chinese practice was developed from observations
that led to the theory that energy flows through channels between the
surface of the body and internal organs. Traditional Chinese medicine
teaches that pain and disease result when these channels become
blocked.

Physiological Logic
Western medicine has a different explanation. Scientists have
identified the body’s nearly 400 acupuncture points as conductors of
electromagnetic signals, prompting the release of endorphins and
opioids – the body’s natural painkillers – to the muscles, spinal cord
and brain.

Physiologic changes have been well documented, including alterations
in brain chemistry through the release of neurotransmitters and
hormones. A 1998 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences showed changes in blood flow in the visual cortex of the
brain when an acupuncture needle was inserted in the fifth toe to
treat ocular problems.

“Acupuncture has the singular advantage of being a relatively benign
treatment,” says Dowden. “You can treat the patients and the worst
that can happen is they don’t get better. So it is very good as an
alternative treatment – if the alternative is surgery or medication.”

For Golianu, it isn’t an either/or issue. “I think it’s a matter of
integrating the two,” she says.

But it can take a healthy dose of persuasion to get a child to try
acupuncture, despite the fact that its fine, solid needles typically
do not cause any of the pain associated with vaccinations.

Indeed, an April 2000 study in Pediatrics found that 70 percent of
children treated with acupuncture felt it helped their symptoms, while
two-thirds described the treatment as pleasant.

Babies and teenagers make the best subjects. Carly Brown, a 14-year-
old Packard Hospital patient suffering from unexplained abdominal
pain, is eager to try it when Julie Good, MD, a pediatrician who
specializes in palliative care, stops by her hospital room.

Good, who studied acupuncture during her fellowship in pain management
at Packard, has just inserted three needles in Carly’s abdomen when
Tzielan Lee, MD, a pediatric rheumatology fellow, enters the room.

Lee had ordered some tests on Carly and wants to discuss their
findings: the possibility that minocycline, a strong antibiotic that
she’d been taking months earlier for acne, might have set off an
autoimmune reaction that would account for her abdominal pain.

But first Lee apologizes: She has a stuffy nose, she says, and is
sounding very nasal.

“Would you like to try a little acupuncture for that?” Good offers.
Without wasting a minute, she tears out a couple of needles and pushes
them into opposite sides of Lee’s nose. It makes her look a bit like a
walrus.

“Oh wow!” she exclaims, laughing. “That feels really good. The
electricity is amazing. Oh yes, that just opened it all up.”

Lee turns to Carly. “Do you mind if I talk to you like this?”

Carly, prone on the bed with needles still sticking out from various
parts of her body, giggles.

“It’s going to get better,” Lee reassures her. “It could take up to a
year but it will get better.”

“But she’s not going to have to suffer for a year?” her mother asks
anxiously.

“She’s not going to have to suffer for a year because we have some
tools to work with here,” says Lee. The needles in her nose wiggle as
she speaks.

Lee turns to Good and marvels: “I’m definitely less stuffed!”

Comments? Contact Stanford Medicine at
medicinemag-owner@lists.Stanford.edu

The previous statement is a lie.  And the fact that you cannot find a
statement from me that post-dates 2003 in which I expressed that sentiment,
or any statement from me in which the statement was not clearly meant
sarcastically, indicates that you know it to be a lie.

I know that reasoning by analogy (or any kind of reasoning when it comes
to acupuncture) is not in your skill set, but nonetheless, has it ever
occurred to you that in 1950, it would have been possible to say the
same things about lobotomy that you have been saying about acupuncture?

Speaking of people reluctant to accept facts outside of their chosen
belief system,

Have you read the original article that reported the results of the 2004
osteoarthritis study?

Have you read any of the citations that I posted in February?

Have you read either of the citations that I posted that present evidence
that acupuncture is no more effective than a placebo in treating people
addicted to smoking?

Have you read the article that I cited that presented evidence that
acupuncture is not effective against constipation?

<crickets chirping>

-----
Richard Schultz                              schultr@mail.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
-----
"It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean.  Do you have to salt your
truth so heavily that it does not even quench thirst any more?"