Critique of the NIH Consensus Conference on Acupuncture
On November 3-5, 1997, the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) held what it called a Consensus Conference on Acupuncture. The meeting was set up by Alan Trachtenberg, M.D., a former acting director of the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) and a strong advocate of acupuncture. The conference was co-sponsored by the Office of Medical Applications of Research (OMAR) with the OAM in a supporting role. The first question that arose after viewing the speaker program was why there was an absence of speakers known to have done acupuncture research but who had obtained negative results. In 1986, a review of acupuncture research by Vincent and Richardson revealed that a majority of evaluable research papers showed essentially no significant effect from acupuncture for pain, when …
Continue Reading >Acupuncture: Nonsense with Needles
Immediately before and after the visit of former President Richard M. Nixon to the People’s Republic of China in 1972, reports circulated in the West suggesting that major surgery could be accomplished with acupuncture as the only anesthetic agent. The impression was given that acupuncture was widely used and could be applied in high-risk cases, in children, in the aged, and in veterinary surgery. Perhaps the best-known rumor about “acupuncture anesthesia” was that The New York Times’s noted political analyst James Reston had his appendix removed with acupuncture as the anesthetic. Whatever the reasons for the currency of these ideas, they were, every single one of them, untrue. Acupuncture as a System of Medicine Chen-Chiu, or acupuncture-moxibustion, is a technique of medical treatment that began …
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