Before Aspirin:
Acupuncture

A woman receives acupuncture.

In China people have used needles to stop pain for thousands of years, in a technique called acupuncture. A treatment involves sticking very thin and sharp needles into the patient at specific places on the body. It sounds agonizing, but most patients don't feel any pain.

Traditional acupuncture is deeply rooted in ancient Chinese philosophy. But hard scientific proof is hard to come by. Studying acupuncture is difficult because there are many different ways to do it. Which method does one test?

Chinese acupuncture point chart.

Also, to test if a pain reliever works, we have to test it against a placebo. This means we give some test patients the real treatment, and others a phony treatment, called a placebo. But we don't tell the patients who got the real thing and who got the placebo. We do this because sometimes even a phony medicine will make a patient feel better if the patient believes it will. So we have to compare medicines to placebos to tell how much of the healing comes from the medicine and how much comes from that patient's positive attitude.

It is very hard to come up with a good placebo in an acupuncture study, because the test patients can tell figure out which ones are getting stuck with needles and which ones aren't. Sometimes "sham acupuncture" is used, where some patients get a regular acupuncture treatment, while the placebo patients get acupuncture carried out in an ineffective manner. But since so many people disagree about what is the "right" way to do acupuncture, it's not easy to invent a "wrong" way to do it. The "wrong" way you invent might be someone else's "right" way!

Electroacupuncture

If acupuncture does work, how does it work? Two ideas are the most common. The first says that the needles cause the body to make endorphins. Endorphins are compounds that can stop you from feeling pain. Other people think acupuncture is a placebo, and only stops pain because patients believe it will. Whether or not acupuncture really does stop pain, it is important to science to get to the bottom of what is going on here. Figuring out if or how it works are questions that need clever and creative scientists to answer.

For more information, at other websites...

A Neuroscientist Investigates Acupuncture — a critical look at the practice from the New England Skeptical Society.