For those who don’t know, NCCAM is the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and it’s as impressive as you might think (boldface mine):
“Some of these treatments were just distinctly made up out of people’s imaginations,” said Dr. Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University. “We don’t take public money and invest it in projects that are just made up out of people’s imaginations.”
“Lots of good science and good scientists are going unfunded,” said Dr. David Gorski, a breast cancer researcher at Wayne State University, who has been a vocal critic of NCCAM. “How can we justify wasting money on something like this when there are so many other things that are much more plausible and much more likely to result in real benefit?”
…many mind and body treatments that are being studied, like qigong and acupuncture, also involve the purported manipulation of a universal energy or life force, sometimes called qi — metaphysical concepts unproved by science and incompatible with our modern understanding of how the body works.
In an email, Briggs wrote that it isn’t necessary to invoke qi or other ancient concepts to study therapies that may benefit people with chronic pain, a significant health problem.
NCCAM’s continuing interest in acupuncture comes even though many of its studies have found that acupuncture and similar therapies work no better than a sham treatment at easing symptoms like pain and fatigue.
…And yet, instead of declaring these studies convincingly negative, NCCAM is pouring more research money into acupuncture.
“The intellectual dishonesty is just astounding,” said Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine and a critic of NCCAM. “They are just quietly changing the question and the rules.”
By my informal and unofficial estimate, the NHGRI sequencing center cuts led to at least 90 firings of productive scientists who were producing tangible, real results, as opposed to reconfirming repeatedly the failure of a sham treatment.
Awesome.
mikethemadbiologist
first link has too much mikethemadbiologist.com/ in it
meh.
from your link [which, btw, needs fixing]:
“NCCAM’s continuing interest in acupuncture comes even though many of its studies have found that acupuncture and similar therapies work no better than a sham treatment at easing symptoms like pain and fatigue.
[…]
Many studies, including those funded by NCCAM, find that true acupuncture performs no better than when a person is fooled into thinking he is getting acupuncture through the use of placebos like retractable needles or even toothpicks twirled on the skin.
People often report feeling less pain or less fatigued regardless of whether they receive real or fake acupuncture, suggesting a placebo effect at work.
[…]
Acupuncture researcher Dr. Brian Berman, principal investigator for $24 million in NCCAM grants since 1999, wrote in a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that a 2008 analysis of acupuncture studies involving 6,000 patients with lower back pain found no significant difference between true acupuncture and sham acupuncture, though both did better than usual care.”
so tell me again, how is getting poked by a sharp toothpick is a PLACEBO for getting poked by a sharp needle? because that nejm paper suggests that being poked with sharp objects, whatever their composition, works better than drugs or whatever the “usual care” is for lower back pain.
One involves breaking the skin, the other doesn’t. And they both work as well as retractable needles, and pretty much anything that the patient thinks is acupuncture. And it involves lying to the patient, and costs hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Or you could go read a review of the study by someone else here.
…assuming that link works.
“… and pretty much anything that the patient thinks is acupuncture.”
i’ve read a lot of these purported debunkings of acupuncture, and so far, every single one i’ve seen has included sticking people with sharp objects as a control for… sticking people with sharp objects. what if sticking people with sharp objects is what works, and breaking the skin vs not breaking the skin, and on the meridian vs not on the meridian, and whatever other “control,” is more akin to measuring the efficacy of two aspirin vs the efficacy of one aspirin? a placebo is a placebo just because i say it is? srsly?
speaking of aspirin, if there were shamanic rituals associated with the chewing of tree bark, the woo-haters would never be able to discover aspirin or quinine.