ACUPUNCTURE? LET'S BE RATIONAL!. Review on Knowing More About Diseases / Illness

Just because I can use a laptop or a PC, does that give me the liberty of claiming myself as a computer engineer?

This is exactly the present state of affairs with proponents of alternative medicine. People who have really have no idea of how the human body works and how delicately all its systems are interlinked are masquerading as experts in alternative therapies. It take 10 to 15 years of backbreaking hard work and studies to be able to practice modern medicine, whereas, you will find plenty of 10th pass quacks claiming to be experts in reiki and acupressure and calling themselves doctors. Shameful. And our country's system allows them to practice their dangerous art gleefully.

Focussing on acupuncture, all those trials which have found acupuncture to be useful were unscientifically carried out, based on opinions of the patients and not on objective findings and biased in the sense that they were not compared with placebos or other established therapies.

In 1971, an acupuncture boom occurred in the United States. The National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine(NCCAOM) was set up to determine certification standards. By November 1998, 32 states had licensing laws, and they had certified several thousand practitioners. As news of treatment failures and cheating started pouring in, they were forced to review the whole certification procedure. The US secretary for education had to acknowledge “Certification of acupuncturists is a sham. While a few of those so accredited are naive physicians, most are nonmedical persons who only play at being doctor and use this certification as an umbrella for a host of unproven  New Age treatments. Unfortunately, a few HMOs, hospitals, and even medical schools are succumbing to the bait and exposing patients to such bogus treatments when they need real medical care.”

The National Council Against Health Fraud concluded:

1. Acupuncture is an unproven modality of treatment.

   
   




2. Its theory and practice are based on primitive and fanciful concepts of health and disease that bear no relationship to present scientific knowledge

   
   




3. Research during the past 20 years has not demonstrated that acupuncture is effective against any disease.

   
   




4. Perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, conditioning, and other psychologic mechanisms.

   
   




5. The use of acupuncture should be restricted to appropriate research settings.

   
   




6. Insurance companies should not be required by law to cover acupuncture treatment.

   
   




7. Licensure of lay acupuncturists should be phased out.

   
   




8. Consumers who wish to try acupuncture should discuss their situation with a knowledgeable physician who has no commercial interest.

   
   

*There are many dangerous side effects of acupuncture as well.

Infection– Since the needles pierce the skin, there is the potential for introducing bacteria into the bloodstream and causing an infection at the puncture site or elsewhere in the body. An important consideration is the sterilization process of the needles so that the chance of the needles being contaminated is reduced. Also improperly sterilized needles can transmit deadly diseases such as AIDS/HIV and hepatitis.

Nerve damage – Nerve damage can occur as a result of a nerve being pierced or nicked when inserting the Acupuncture needle.

Organ punctures – Inserting the needle deep into the lung can cause the lung to collapse. The same potential exists for the other vital organs of the body like liver damage, stomach puncture etc. There is the chance a kidney or the protective sac around the heart could be punctured. There is also a risk of stroke induced by Acupuncture if the needle is inserted improperly at the base of the skull.

A study published in 2001 illustrates the absurdity of acupressure & acupuncture practices. A 40-year-old woman with chronic back pain who visited seven acupuncturists during a two-week period was diagnosed with "Qi stagnation" by 6 of them, "blood stagnation" by 5, "kidney Qi deficiency" by 2, "yin deficiency" by 1, and "liver Qi deficiency" by 1. The proposed treatments varied even more. Among the six who recorded their recommendations, the practitioners planned to use between 7 and 26 needles inserted into 4 to 16 specific "acupuncture points" in the back, leg, hand, and foot. Of 28 acupuncture points selected, only 4(14%) were prescribed by two or more acupuncturists. The study appears to have been designed to make the results as consistent as possible. All of the acupuncturists had been trained at a school of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM). This appears to be the first published study that examines the(in) consistency of TCM diagnosis or treatment. It would be fascinating to see what would happen if a healthy person was examined by multiple acupuncturists.

Thanks as always for reading my stuff. Comments & criticism invited. I’m only asking the reader to be rational.