I think my wife through out the magazine, but it was in the most recent
version of "Tinnitus Today" magazine.  However,it referred to another study
somebody else did.  I will have to dig for this.

"Janice 写道：
"

I can provide testimony to the positive effect of acupuncture
treatment.  I complained frequently in this ng about 'somatic
discomfort'...'red spot moving from side to side of my brain..' This
illness with unknown cause and unknown name bothered me for 2 years.
No one in this group seemed to know what I was talking about.  I went
to see many doctors including neurologists and found no answer.  It was
by accident that I was introduced to an acupuncturist in Vancouver and
the maddening discomfort was cured.  The result of the treatment was
that the discomfort was gone but the tinnitus noise was left behind; it
too subsided over time.

I think in my case the acupuncture treatment might have touched upon a
spot that was the cause of my 'somatic discomfort'.  And this 'somatic
discomfort' may have born a direct or indirect relationship to my
tinnitus.

Thus I recommend anyone who has run out of alternatives to try
acupuncture for 2 visits.  If nothing happens after the second visit,
just drop it.  Similar suggestion goes for gingko.  You can read and
read all that 'controlled studies' afterwards...

Get a referal to someone who his patients say is good and try it for 2
times....

=======================
"Anonymous 写道：
"

"Barry" <Rodney@home.com> wrote in part:

There are difficulties, but actually some excellent double-blind and
single-blind studies have been done of acupuncture and tinnitus.

One way to do a double blind study is to regard the acupuncturist as part of
the treatment. The experimenter does not know who are the real
acupuncturists and who are people trained to use the needles safely but not
where to place them.

A single-blind approach has used electric needles that impart an electric
charge (sometimes used these days in acupuncture, rather than needle
insertions). The acupuncturists did not know if they were using real needles
or fake ones.

Subject-blinded studies have been done where trained acupuncturists treat
the subjects in all cases, but the control group has the nnedles inserted in
the wrong places.

There are other blinding methods that have been used, as well.

Bottom line in all: acupuncture has been studied perhaps more than any other
treatment and has been found not to work.

People just throw up their arms and say that there is no one certain
treatment for tinnitus and there are multiple causes.  Although this is
true, that does not mean that a treatment can not be found.  But I think
there is a pattern, it is just hidden in a lot of noise.  Nobody questions
this, nor did the study ever claim that acupuncture was effective for all
forms of tinnitus.

Suppose a large number of people are given a treatment and people say it
improves their tinnitus from 0 - 40%, with an average improvement of 20%.
But the people will vary their answers from +- 20 % on a given day, and
there is another 20% placebo effect.   Does this mean that you can not
extract useful information from this study?  NO!   The  +-20% people change
their answers will be averaged out in a large sample.   The 20% placebo
effect can be dealt with in a double blind study, or comparing to placebo
effects from other experiments.  Even if this treatment is only truly 5%
effective, the treatment can be targeted at those who it was effective.  For
example, the treatment could be only 5% effective for T as a whole but 50%
effective for those who have high pitched tinnitus.

If similar experiments are done, then these results can be averaged and the
important information can be found. Then the treatment can be linked with
the cause and the type of tinnitus.  So even if it turns out that the above
treatment only really improves tinnitus by 5%, one can focus on who this
improved it for and refine the treatment.

Before you go saying that alternative treatments are not effective, you need
data to show this.   Otherwise, it is just one opinion against another.
What is lacking is data showing that a treatment does not improve T, and the
findings need to be statistically significant.  That's useful information
too.  We don't want to chase treatments that don't work.

In general, I wish that I could get better doccumentation on all these
studies, and that they would do a large enough sample size so that we can
draw useful conclusions.