Acupuncture placebo?

[Guest guest]

Sham headache therapy beat out real thing

 

By PAUL TAYLOR

 

Globe and Mail

http://globeandmail.com

 

Friday, May 6, 2005 Page A19

 

Acupuncture appears to be fairly effective at easing the excruciating

pain of migraine headaches, according to a new German study. But the

same research also shows that sham, or phony, acupuncture seems to work

even better.

 

The findings have scientists scratching their heads, wondering what to

make of it all. The study, published this week in the Journal of the

American Medical Association, involved 302 migraine sufferers who were

divided into three groups.

 

One group got standard acupuncture treatments. Another was given phony

treatments, in which the needles were neither inserted to the proper

depth nor at the regular acupuncture points on the body. A third group

was not given any special treatment.

 

Among those who received the real thing, 51 per cent said the number of

their headaches was reduced by half. Results were slightly better in the

sham group: 53 per cent claimed their headaches were cut by half. (In

the non-treatment group, 15 per cent reported a 50-per-cent drop in

headaches.)

 

The scientists, at Technische Universität in Munich, suggested two

possible explanations for their surprising results. First, the sham

treatment might have had some real physiological effects on the body.

Or, the patients may have been strongly influenced by the so-called

placebo effect: They thought they were getting the real treatment so

they just felt better. The researchers also can't rule out a combination

of the two.

[Guest guest]

Acupuncture appears to be fairly effective at easing the excruciating

pain of migraine headaches, according to a new German study. But the

same research also shows that sham, or phony, acupuncture seems to work

even better.

The findings have scientists scratching their heads, wondering what to

make of it all.

 

 

MM: you know, it occurs to me that acupuncture may be an example of a situation

in which the OBSERVER effects the experiment. empirical science as it is taught

in 'high school' and even practiced in universities is not well understood

philosophically and people do not realize that as an epistemological method, its

metaphysical presuppositions have been obsolete for hundreds of years.

however, even if we accept these ridiculous presuppositions, such as determinate

form, efficient causation, objecthood, identity across time, etc, scientific

knowledge is STILL NOT POSSIBLE. see popper's work THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC

DISCOVERY. science, as it is designed, can only DISPROVE previous theories. it

CANNOT and NEVER COULD produce POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE. even with its ridiculous

metaphysical presuppositions, which can be disproved by any schoolboy with more

than a semester of philosophy, it still CANNOT PRODUCE POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE. it

just wasnt set up that way.

i suspect that acupuncture may be one of those phenomena that cannot be easily

scrutinized by this clumsy epistemological device we call 'science.' is light a

particle or a wave? well, it depends on what you presuppose it as. does that

mean that light does not exist? have the effects of light been 'disproven?'

heh. we need to start out with FIRST PERSON METHODS in our epistemology and go

from there.

http://web.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/

in the end, all we are left with is subjective appraisal.

mercurius trismegistus