Check out the Wall Street Journal article that came out yesterday: Finding Science in Acupuncture.
Melinda Beck profiles various doctors and academics and explores how “acupuncture works in treating arthritis, and back pain.”
Highlights
- “….the use of acupuncture continues to spread—often alongside conventional medicine. U.S. Navy, Air Force and Army doctors are using acupuncture to treat musculoskeletal problems, pain and stress in stateside hospitals and combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
- “3.2 million Americans had undergone acupuncture in the past year—up from 2.1 million in 2001, according to the government’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.”
- “It’s not like there’s a Merck Manual for acupuncture,” says Joseph M. Helms, who has trained some 4,000 physicians in acupuncture at his institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Every case is evaluated on an individual basis, based on the presentation of the patient and the knowledge of the acupuncturist.”
In the March 29, 2010 issue of Forbes Magazine, Harvard Medical School Professor Ted J. Kaptchuk discusses how the body tends to heal itself…sort of.
In 2008 ,Kaptchuk, 62, whose “western” college degree is in religious studies from Columbia University, devised a clinical study involving irritable bowel syndrome. In a trial involving 262 patients with severe IBS, he subjected them to a fake acupuncture delivered with lots of warm talk from a sympathetic acupuncturist but involving no needles.
He found that 62 percent of those who received the fake treatment got better. Only 29 percent of a control group of patients put on a waiting list saw their symptoms get better. A third group who obtained the fake acupuncture, but without a warm, friendly talk also got better. His findings were published in the British Medical Journal.
His conclusion: “Our own will, imagination and belief can modulate the course of illness.”
I also assume that he imagined that he should be a professor at Harvard Medical School without a medical degree and voila it happened.
The Business Insider has a cool slideshow titled “10 reasons why the US healthcare system is the envy of the world“. Check it out to go more in depth with their charts and slides.
- Most preemptive cancer screening
- Highest rate of cancer survival
- Highest rate of cancer survival
- Most identification and treatment of psychological disease
- Most advanced equipment per capita
- Highest pay attracts the best doctors
- Most advanced research
- If you have the money, US health care is nonpareil
- If you are injured by malpractice, you can sue like mad
- Health care reform will be even harder in countries that take exce
