joey0825 wrote:
I did go celebrate 雙十節 after work. We don't have a lot of holidays. Thankfully, I love my job!
雙十節快樂! (Though, belated, hope you'll forgive me.)
joey0825 wrote:
As for the treatment of allergic rhinitis, we seldom use acupuncture, since Chinese herbal medicine is more effective in our own experience.
Fair enough -- please forgive my earlier assumption. (There are of course practitioners out there that use acupuncture for allergic rhinitis, so my apologies for assuming that your practice included this treatment.)
With regard to the herbs that you use in treatment of allergic rhinitis (AR), are you able to give specific details of the herbs that you use? If you have any specific clinical studies available documenting the use of these herbs, are you able to post references to them?
In December 1979, the World Health Organization published an extensive report of acupuncture and Chinese Medicine. WHO endorsed the use of acupuncture to treat 43 symptoms. In 1996, this was extended to 64 indications.
Here’s a WHO report of the effect of acupuncture, you guys might want to take a look.
http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/pdf/s4926e/s4926e.pdf
I've read through this report. It does seem that many of the cited research studies are no longer accessible (or are so old that they were never published in electronic form.) With regard to acupuncture, it seems clear that many earlier studies were poorly designed, or were later found to have suffered from publication bias.
The WHO, as a collection of national and international bodies, is unfortunately not immune to this bias.
To my knowledge, there have been over 3000 medical trials into the effectiveness of acupuncture.
From my understanding of the research, more modern trials and subsequent clinical reviews have discovered that in most cases:
true acupuncture and sham acupuncture treatments are no different in decreasing pain levels across multiple chronic pain disorders.
where studies have shown a difference between sham and non-sham treatments, the difference could be accounted for by statistical error.
the modest effect shown by acupuncture / sham acupuncture could be accounted for by the placebo effect.
Having said that, I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.
I'm glad that you brought evidence to us. Nevertheless, I need to remind you that it's hard to prove the effectiveness of TCM in Evidence-based medicine.
Then I might ask, if you have no scientific evidence, then how do you know that it works? If the medicine is effective, then surely it's possible to show that it's effective through the means of clinical trials?
Since we seldom use single pure compound to treat patients, we use formula including 8-10+ herbs. If you go analyze each herbs with modern technology, they often contain more than 20 compounds. That makes research even more difficult.
If research has not yet been performed on these compounds, does that mean you are trying untested medical formulations on your patients?
That's why TCM is so different from modern medicine. We provide personalized prescription, according to the distribution or amount of the Qi, blood, yin, yang in your body. We take history and feel the pulse, see your tongue to measure what can't be measured by modern technology-- Qi, blood, yin, yang,etc.
If Qi, blood, yin and yang cannot be measured, then how do you know these concepts exist?
And we use herbal medicine and acupuncture to adjust them to a balance. In the report of WHO, it states: “From the viewpoint of modern medicine, the principal action of acupuncture is to regulate the function of the human body and to increase its resistance by enhancing the immune system and the antiphlogistic (counteracting inflammation), analgesic, antispastic, antishock and antiparalytic abilities of the body.” Some scientists try very hard to find out what is meridian and acupoints. They did the autopsy. Didn't find anything. Because the ancient classics had already told us that the Qi only flow in a live body. That's why they can't find anything in a dead body.
Do you have any scientific evidence for the existence of Qi?
If scientists have tried very hard to find a physical basis for meridians and acupoints, but haven't succeeded, on what basis can you claim that they exist?
With specific regard to acupoints, modern clinical studies (as far as I am aware) show that the precise position of acupuncture needles is not important, and has no bearing on the effect size. If there is no scientific or medical evidence to show that choice of acupuncture site makes a difference, then is there any reason to believe that these points are special?
Thanks for reading this far, and glad to have this open discussion with you. Hope you are enjoying the long weekend.
Statistics: Posted by 外星人 — Today, 10:50