Although acupuncture as a discipline has a 1500 year heritage, nevertheless it is still trying to find credibility in many areas of western mainstream medicine.  It faces little opposition in terms of its efficacy in China and much of the eastern world.  The reason for this is based on the value of evidence based practice vs practice based evidence.  Evidence based practice in the West is still considered the gold standard, whilst practice based evidence is increasingly challenging the credibility of evidence based practice as the sole means by which something is deemed to be credible.  As Einstein famously put it, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.  We would do well to remember this.

Practice based evidence is more subjective in its analysis.  It is concerned with the reason behind the hypothesis, not just the hypothesis itself.  So, even though there are millions of people the world over claiming acupuncture has been life-changing for them, especially in areas of chronic pain, the evidence based practice approach is saying we don’t have enough empirical evidence to support this.  In other words, the patient’s experience is considered to be no more than their opinion and is often described as the placebo effect.  What this amounts to is saying the patient’s experience counts for nothing – we would argue the patient’s experience is everything.  Is not the whole point of any therapy to bring about improvement and where possible, lasting change.  And if that has been achieved in terms of the client’s experience, has the goal not been met?

To write off the patient’s experience as merely placebo is to misunderstand the role that the placebo effect has in the healing process. The placebo effect is a worthy tool that we can actively use as part of any treatment programme.  We have written a lot about this subject elsewhere for those who want to explore it further.

In this article, produced by the National Institutes of Health, there is an updated patient data meta-analysis which is in response to the trend of dismissing acupuncture as a placebo only treatment.  The analysis concludes that acupuncture is an effective treatment for chronic pain both in the short and long term, at a level that includes and goes beyond the placebo effect.

To read the article in full, please click here:  Acupuncture and Chronic Pain