170 Acupuncture for Skeptics
Another reward for an awesome Kickstarter Backer!
I don’t know why Harriet Hall hasn’t appeared in a blog post yet, but now I have a reason! She Has been active in fighting sham medicine for years. One of her old articles on acupuncture is an excellent breakdown of an ancient practice that is not only a theatrical placebo, but is also probably not ancient.
“Acupuncture works, but placebos work too. Acupuncture has been shown to “work” to relieve pain, nausea, and other subjective symptoms, but it has never been shown to alter the natural history or course of any disease.”
Here is her talk from a 2012 European Skeptics conference in Germany where she breaks down all different kinds of “Fairy Tale Science and Placebo Medicine.” I skipped to the part about acupuncture for relevancy, but feel free to watch the whole thing if the topic is interesting to you.
Hello! I'm interested in a beginner's acupuncture class.
CURTIS
Sorry, we don't really do that.
WYLONA
But my friend is a science nerd who says it's just a placebo and I really want to try it on him.
CURTIS
These are extra-strength.
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“Say Doc, do you have to put those boxes right next to each other?”
*points to box labelled “needles” right next to “poisoned-tipped needles”
“Why? What do they say?”
“Yeah… I think we’re done here”
Note, there are multiple variants of acupuncture therapy such as electrically charged needles (where they basically hook up the needles to a car battery. My dad tried it. Sounds more like a torture technique, don’t it?) and accupressure, where they don’t even use the needle. They just apply the pressure directly on “qi points” …so an uncomfortable poke basically.
I remember my mother getting me an acupuncturist last year to help straighten my slightly bended spine due to bad posture when sitting for years on computer.
I remember how painful it was and how my back muscles keep tensing up for hours after each session, likely due to the pain triggering some kind of stress response, and I had to do it every day for 4 weeks or more. After that, my spine wasn’t looking any better. I suspected a batman spine punch might do a much better job.
Batman spine punch. Those 3 words. You, Sir or Madam, get a tip of my hat for coming up with that 3-word phrase (if you did indeed come up with it)
If I ever start a metal band, I’d name it batman spine punch.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but why is Doctor McCoy there?!?!?! IS SHE MESSING WITH STAR TREK?!?!??! 🙂
Nothing says “This is not a placebo” quite like an entire knitting needle in your back… I don’t mean that acupuncture is real, mind…
Considering it was a skeptical video on a skeptical channel, I was surprised to see that every one of the comments on the first page of comments to the video were highly critical of the presentation and its general perspective. Can we fix that? Can we leave some insightful, positive, kind comments?
HA! Yeah, you can’t ask the trolls to be nice.
Classic old joke: The acupuncture cure for a toothache is sitting on a thumbtack. Guaranteed to make you stop thinking about that tooth.
No matter what they say about its effectiveness, acupunture doesn’t work on balloons. Or on that alien in Darkstar. However, I’ve never seen a porcupine with backache so maybe there’s some potential for application of it in a veterinary practice. Maybe to cure a bad back the natural way, all you need to do is lie down on a porcupine? My back is ok, but if anyone with a bad back wants to test my natural acupuncture method, please get back to me and let me know if it works so I can make millions from it.
You don’t lie down on a porcupine, that’s ridiculous. You stick your face right into it, obviously. (Insert Chinese traditional medicine qi mumbo-jumbo woo-woo and how the face works). Hook it up to a car battery for a hundred extra dollars (like the one in Chinatown L.a. that my parents went to)