Quackery!

As a follow-up to my post on skepticism and hypnosis, I thought I would take a look at skepticism and acupuncture.

Needless to say, skeptics deplore acupuncture as a pseudoscientific method based on mystical principles. This attitude is perhaps most pithily expressed by arch skeptic James Randi (aptly characterized by one of the commenters on this blog as the Pope of the Church of Skepticism).

Here's a Randi quote from a fawning 1998 newspaper profile: "Even the Learning Channel has stuff on homeopathy and acupuncture. Quackery!"

The article also includes this interesting tidbit. While describing Randi as a gifted student, it goes on to say, "At 17 he dropped out of high school and joined a carnival road show as Prince Ibis, the all-knowing wizard in a turban."

I'd known Randi never went to college, but I hadn't realized he never finished high school. No matter how gifted he may be, does a high school dropout really have the qualifications to critique biochemists like Jacques Benveniste and quantum physicists like Brian Josephson?

According to pal Leon Jaroff, formerly of Time magazine, yes indeed.

"He's very smart," Jaroff says. "He has set up better double-blind experiments than scientists can. And he's meticulously honest."

Randi's critics often attack his lack of scientific training.

"But he's a magician. He's trained in the art of deception," Jaroff points out. "He knows what to look for when he's investigating a fraud." 

Randi has set up better double blind experiments than scientists can?

And he's meticulously honest?

Anyway, back to acupuncture. In a 2002 Internet chat session to promote a BBC show debunking homeopathy (and Benveniste, Randi's longtime bete noir), Randi again tackled this subject. 

SteveC: Do you believe acupuncture is quackry or real?

James Randi: Acupuncture is just a much older form of quackery [than homeopathy]. We have offered our million dollar prize to the acupuncturists too. Where are they?

The million buck prize never gets old, does it? Anyone who's still taken in by that PR stunt is just gullible enough to believe that Randi is "meticulously honest" - and that he knows what he's talking about.

This chat session, by the way, has its odd moments. Here is Randi presumably demonstrating his razor-sharp wit.

Vista: If the results were positive, would you still be sceptical?

James Randi: Yes, I will always be sceptical of things that are not likely to be true. Now, Sophia Loren, that's a different matter.

Huh?

And here's a bit of profundity that must have come out wrong.

checkmate: Were you always a skeptic?

James Randi: Yes, because I've always been a thinking person. Skepticism is not a bad attitude at all. If we have more skeptics we would have more problems.

You know, I could've said the same thing myself (except for the dubious grammar). If we had more skeptics, we would have more problems! But I'm pretty sure he meant to say the opposite.

You can tell that this guy is gifted, though, right? No wonder he didn't need to finish high school. His time spent touring as Prince Ibis obviously served as better preparation for evaluating the work of chemists, physicists, psychological researchers, and medical doctors. 

Okay, so twice Rand has told us that acupuncture is quackery. This of course raises the question: Is it?

Answers are so terribly hard to come by that I had to spend all of five minutes on Google in order to find them.

It seems there's good evidence to show that acupuncture reduces the postoperative effects of breast surgery:

Acupuncture is just as effective as the leading medication used to reduce nausea and vomiting after major breast surgery, according to a new study conducted by Duke University Medical Center researchers. The 5,000-year-old Chinese practice also decreased postoperative pain in these women, they report.... Duke researchers believe acupuncture is an effective antiemetic (a drug that reduces nausea and vomiting) that is less expensive and has fewer side effects than medications currently used.... "We've known from previous studies that acupuncture can be an effective antiemetic when compared to placebo, but it has never been tested against one of the most commonly used medications, ondansetron (Zofran)," [a researcher] continued. "Acupuncture turns out to be just as effective as the drug or better, and our patients also reported much less pain after surgery, a finding that surprised us."

And that acupuncture can relieve shoulder pain after surgery:

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of traditional Chinese acupuncture in the treatment of scapulohumeral pain during the early stage following heart surgery.... Reduction of pain and angular gain were almost immediate, durable, measurable and reproducible....

And that wrist acupuncture can relieve postoperative nausea at least as well as pain meds: 

Wrist acupuncture is as effective as medication for easing post-operation nausea, according to research reported next Saturday in the British weekly New Scientist. Hong Kong and Australian scientists reviewed 26 trials [involving] 3,000 patients who were either given P6 acupuncture or sham treatment ... Those who received the right treatment were 28 per cent less likely to feel nauseous and 24 per cent less likely to ask for anti-sickness drugs compared to those who got the placebo treatment. Acupuncture was just as effective as routine anti-sickness drugs in preventing nausea and vomiting, but had few side effects and was cheaper, the study found.

Electrostimulation acupuncture is used instead of anesthesia by some Chinese surgeons performing invasive procedures: 

A woman in her 60's presented with a fractured ulnar olecranon. The surgery would include the placing of some nails and other hardware into her olecranon to fasten it more securely to the shaft of the ulna.

Due to her advanced years, it was decided that acupuncture anesthesia would be used instead of Western drugs to avoid any possible adverse reactions.

One half hour before the surgery, while the prep was taking place, we inserted two needles into the patient.... The electro-stim began at 100 Hz ... to simply stimulate the body into secreting endorphins.... Once the surgery began, the patient complained of some discomfort and we turned the strength of the electro-stim up from "1" to "2". The idea isn't to double the amplitude, but to simply turn it up to induce the anesthetic response of the nerve being effected. We also turned down the frequency form 100 Hz to 50 Hz...

The controls didn't once change after the surgery began. The surgery lasted about 45 minutes and went off without a hitch. After the cut was sutured and the nurses were cleaning up the patient, we removed the needles. The patient was in good spirits.

Acupuncture can relieve lower back pain and leg pain: 

The use of acupuncture for lumbar disc protrusion pain provided convenient and effective pain relief without side effects. Although the limitations ... of our study must be considered, classical acupuncture appears to be superior to placebo acupuncture in limiting the overall disabilities caused by the pain of lumbar disc protrusion pain.

Patients at Cedars-Sinai swear by acupuncture:

Caroll Clark is one of the Cedars-Sinai patients who volunteered for acupuncture therapy. She expected the bed rest after surgery to exacerbate an ongoing back problem.

"I have a vertebra in my back that I was a little concerned about, that I had told the doctor about," she said. "My back was hurting the first two days (after surgery) and then when they did the acupuncture, it quit hurting and I never took any pills after the second day I was in the hospital. One evening I took some Extra Strength Tylenol but as far as pain pills, the narcotic kind, I didn't have to take any after that."

Her pain relief was so complete, Clark thought she was receiving pain medication. "I asked the nurse about it. She said, 'No, you don't get pain medicine unless you ask for it. Do you want some?' I said, no, I just thought you gave it to me naturally because I wasn't having pain."

Now ... either ignore all the above information or dismiss it as unreliable. Then repeat after me, in your best Aflac duck voice:

Quackery! Quackery! Quackery!

Congratulations. You are now a skeptic.

Comments

[Bob Wallace]

Acupunncture meridians are minute DC electrical currents, and the points are DC booster stations. The metal needles increase or decrease the currents.

Randi knows this, and apparently refuses to believe there is electricity in peoples' bodies. Or does he not believe in EKGs and EEGs?

[Tom]

I once did an internship with an acupuncturist who once told me that while western medicine can describe in details how your body works, but it has never been able to tell you what makes it 'tick.' From reading all the researches and books on the topic, i found that most people, even from western medicine, commonly acknowledged that what Eastern Medicine believes as 'chi' is an electrical current that runs throughout your body. of course, many new age people would argue that this energy is your soul and so forth.. i dont know about that.
but i do know that acupunture is a patient-centered approach to medicine, unlike western medicine, which incorporates symptom-centered approach to medicine.
because of the difference in approach, scientist cannot really perform scientific experiment on it. for example, you can't expect to use the same acupuncture point for asthma on every patients with asthma beecause each patient's body condition is different (just like under stress, some people get ulcer, some get heart disease, or some get stomach ache....etc etc).

for an acupuncturist, he/she not only needs to know about the symptoms, but also what the patient is going through in his/her life at this time, and then the acupuncuturist would check for the patient's pulse, look at the patient's skin tone (eg. some people with liver problem usually have a more yellowish tone on their skin, especially in the face), and ask the patient about his/her diet, job, and family, etc, etc..... so it's a very personal experience.

after the acupuncturist makes his/her diagnosis, the acpuncture itself is only part of the treatment since it would only be performed once or twice a week. the acupuncturist would ask the patient to take some herbs, and change his or her diet..etc etc....... most people, however, only want that magic pill that will make them feel better and do not want to change their lifestyle even though it's their lifestyle that makes them sick. to a certain extent, a person is more prone to infection if his/her body is not in balance...

the eastern medicine asks the patient to take a more proactive approach to his/her health...instead of taking that magic pill. after all, most of over-the-counter medicine (like cough medicine) merely alleviate the patient's symptom, and ultimately, it's the patient's immune system that does the actual fighting.

taking all these things in considerations, how would you expect the scientist to conduct scientific study on acupuncture?

chinese medicine has been in practice for thousand of years in China...that must account for something. to say that acupuncture is just a mass delusion at work is irresponsible and closed-minded.

it's sad that science is used as an infallible approach to everything in life, even for things that can never be measured.

[Jacob]

There was a great BBC documentary on acupuncture where the journalist even traveled to China and also performed scientific MRI experiment for acupuncture. The program clearly showed that acupuncture works (at least for the specific treatments, since scientists can't generalize and say that it works on anything they have not tested).

Anyway, I suggest Randi to take his million and donate it to the various acupuncture research centers in the western world, who proved it to work. Or to the BBC, which he so likes.

[Vitor Moura]

About Sheldrake and Randi, here is Randi's answer. Any comments?

http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-09/091506remembering.html#i7

Re last week’s item on the latest Rupert Sheldrake foray into foolishness, a reader dared to ask the Sheldrake site why they wouldn’t take the JREF million-dollar challenge. This is the answer received:

Thanks for your email. You might be interested to do a search on James Randi from www.skepticalinvestigations.org, which will explain why we haven't taken up this so called challenge. Best wishes Pam Smart (Researcher)

I ask you to go there. You’ll see there just about all of the silly canards about the JREF million-dollar prize that have been circulated on the Internet for the past 10 years, augmented and hyperbolized. I’d say, judging from her statement, that Pam isn’t very smart, and she’s no researcher. At www.randi.org/research/faq.html can be found responses to almost all of those mendacities. A simple search would have established that for Ms. Smart.

Reader and friend Tony Youens, UK, when I asked him if he recalled who Pam Smart was, wrote:

I remembered where I heard the name Pam Smart. Before she became Sheldrake's research assistant she was the owner of the dog who “knew” when she was coming home.

See: www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/dogknows_abs.html.

Thank you, Tony. I knew that name was familiar. Ms. Smart is the person who – for some unknown reason? – refused me access to her “wonder dog,” who had been the subject of some earlier Sheldrake “experiments,” when I signified my willingness to see the work repeated under observation – and offered the JREF million-dollar prize if it worked. Why is it that everyone is so afraid of me?

You must remember that Ms. Smart wasn’t much interested in doing “research” for anything but that kind of rumors and mis-statements she preferred. As a researcher, I would refer to her as a police captain once referred to the late Dorothy Allison – “I don’t think she could find a bowling ball in a bathtub if the ball were on fire.”

[Rudis]

None of the studies you linked to are double-blind. Double-blind studies are very important when testing the efficiency of medical procedures in order to rule out things like the placebo effect, observer bias, etc.

There is a very well-written article describing this here: http://www.mendosa.com/bratman.htm

Additionally, I am unwilling to simply take your word for it that Randi's million dollar prize is just a PR stunt.

From what I have read, the JREF outsources preliminary testing of claims to third parties who have nothing to lose should someone actually manage to successfully demonstrate their claim in a properly conducted experiment. Everyone who has actually made a claim for the prize has failed to pass this preliminary unbiased test, so Randi and the JREF have never even had a chance to test a claim for themselves.

Most of the negative things I ever read about the million dollar challenge are from people who claim to have abilities, but refuse to take the challenge (without citing any actual reason beyond not trusting Randi because he is a skeptic, or because they don't believe he really has a million dollars).

I fully believe that if someone could actually pass the initial experiment and move on to getting tested by Randi and the JREF itself, it would be impossible for either Randi or the claimant to fudge the experiment in his favor. Media coverage would be enormous, every detail of the experiment would be meticulously covered and examined. The results would be impossible to cover up.

I truly see no reason why people who have a testable claim would refuse to take the challenge, other than the fear that they will be undeniably exposed as a fraud.

[Tom]

how would you be able to conduct double blind studies on acupuncture. in the western medicine, this is easy to do since you have a placebo and a treatment that can be applied to a group of patients with the same symptoms (or infection). neither the patients nor the doctors know whether what they prescribe is the placebo or the treatment.

in the case of acupuncture, although there are some pressure points that tailor to a specific symptom, they are by no mean the treatment for that specific patient, since acupuncture is focused on the patient, not the disease. how is placebo even possible? each patient's treatment differs, and you can't really control for them.

there was a study on drug addiction, where the researchers tried to use specific pressure points to treat addiction, where the placebo is a set of pressure points that have no theraputic effect. the results showed that although acupuncture only worked on 30-45% (i dont remember the exact number. will have to look up that article) of the patients, the patients who recovered through acupuncture reported a better wellness of being as compared to the placebo group who recovered from addiction.

for the experiment where they use acupuncture instead of aesetheic during surgery, you really can't use a placebo for that, could you? that would just be unethical.

[Michael Prescott]

>I am unwilling to simply take your word for it that Randi's million dollar prize is just a PR stunt.

You shouldn't take my word for it. I was making an assertion that I didn't back up with any arguments or evidence - because the issue was peripheral to my topic.

I think one's evaluation of Randi's challenge depends on one's evaluation of Randi himself. Those who regard him as honest and reliable will see the challenge as genuine. Those who view him in less positive terms will see the challenge as bogus. My own view is that Randi is a master escape artist in every sense of the term, and (as he was once quoted as saying), he "always has an out." But I would not attempt to convince his supporters of this, because I don't think they're open to persuasion.

[Art]

"I truly see no reason why people who have a testable claim would refuse to take the challenge, other than the fear that they will be undeniably exposed as a fraud." - Rudis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The problem with "Psi" research is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It can be affected by something as simple as a person's mood at the time of the experiment. Just being tired or bored can affect the results, as well as being around unbelievers. Why? Because it all boils down to "thoughts being things and consciousness creating reality." In a world where thoughts are things, the way one thinks can affect the end outcome of an experiment. "Psi" by definition is thought controlled, and any negative energy will affect the outcome. Negative energy can be skepticism, mood, anger, hatred, disbelief, jealousy, or even just hoping that the person fails. We know so little about the mind and how it works. Consciousness research is in it's infancy, and we are just now begining to even come up with plausible theories based on quantum physics and holographic universes and microtubules in the brain and the collapse of quantum waves in trying to understand just how and what consciousness is. Near death experiencers come back and talk about a universe where everything is so interconnected, with a sense of oneness that we here in the physical world can't even begin to understand. The way we think affects our lives in very real ways. We try and hide our real selves, but every once in a while reality slips through and we catch a glimpse of a universe that is more bizarre and weird than we could even begin to imagine. - Art

[John Benneth]

Good one, Michael, I'm glad to see someone is employing critical thinking. About six years ago I took Randi up on his challenge for someone to provide proof for homeopathy. What I experienced was pretty much what you have presented here. He's not interested in the evidence if it contradicts what he wants to disbelieve.
Randi has said repeatedly complained that homeopathy is quackery, and that there is no science to back it up. So I took a look into the research and what I found were dozens of experiements on homeopathic remedies. I listed them at the following address: http://www.psicounsel.com/marius/proof.html
I came up with a simple test to demonstrate, but all it got me from Randi was the middle finger.
The psychic challenge is a PR stunt. There's also some other strange stuff that is going on behind it. From what I've seen skepticism is a cover-up, usually for men with some serious personal problems.
All in all, taking the Psychic Challenge for me was an amazing experience. I learned some profound things that changed my life.

[Liam]

Modern day skeptics. They stir me up as much as new agers stir them up.

Modern day skeptics:

Naysayers
Dogmatists
Defenders of the status quo

The funniest (read scariest) is the way they tow the line of conventional medicine. They reinforce the notion that solutions to medical problems will only be found by pharmaceutical companies.

I don't see any agenda behind their fanaticism, I think they are generally misguided. From one perspective it seems like skeptics are kinds of fatalists who believe there is no opportunity to control your own destiny in this world.

[Vitor Moura]

No comments about Randi's answer to Sheldrake? Wow!

[Michael Prescott]

I just read Randi's reply. His major point is that Pam Smart works for Sheldrake. That's true. Smart didn't work for Sheldrake when he began the Jaytee tests, but she became so interested in Sheldrake's work that she signed on as his assistant. Sheldrake has written about this in his books. So what?

Notice, btw, that Randi doesn't mention that Sheldrake and Smart did allow another skeptic, Richard Wiseman, to test Jaytee. Wiseman represented the test results as negative, but it turned out they were actually positive, and he had fudged his report. Does this give you some idea of why clear-thinking people are skeptical of the skeptics?

I've done two posts in a row showing that Randi ignores voluminous evidence that contradicts his preconceived conclusions. He ignores approximately 5000 surgeries performed at one hospital alone, showing that hypnosis is as effective as anesthesia. And he ignores multiple studies on acupuncture. If he misrepresents the facts in these cases, why should we think he is more reliable in his statements about anything else?

Regarding the million-dollar challenge, we're asked to take Randi's word for its validity. Again, this depends on whether we view him as honest and reliable. If we do, we will take him at his word. If we don't, we won't.

Unfortunately, skepticism is a heavily ego-based mentality. As a result, most skeptics are simply too ego-invested in their position ever to change their minds. Debating with them is a waste of time. The good news is that the more intellectually curious ones eventually outgrow their skepticism. I did!

[Rudis]

I believe you are referring to cynicism in the last paragraph of your comment above.

Skepticism merely means you don't accept things on blind faith, and require evidence to support claims. I would hope that anybody, intellectually curious or not, would see the value in taking that approach to evaluating the world around them.

Skepticism does not imply preconceived notions. It implies accepting things that are supported by scientific evidence, and rejecting those things that are not supported or disproved by evidence.

[LH]

Hi Rudis

Your definition of skepticism is how it should be, however the words of many prominent 'skeptics' illustrate that this is not necessarily the case. Especially in the case of medicine, where skeptics tend to defend allopathic medicine despite it being statistically often not able to meet the skeptics own stringent standards of proof of efficacy.

There have been many articles illustrating what kind of 'success' rates pharmaceutical companies require to deem a treatment as working and most of the time it would not pass the requirement for a Randi challenge.