Something I read today I thought was very interesting – western medicine doesn’t work as well as fake non-medicine, at least for lower back pain. A study found that fake acupuncture worked nearly as well as real acupuncture, and both of those were nearly twice as effective as western medicine.
In the largest experiment on acupuncture for back pain to date, more than 1,100 patients were randomly assigned to receive either acupuncture, sham acupuncture or conventional therapy. For the sham acupuncture, needles were inserted, but not as deeply as for the real thing. The sham acupuncture also did not insert needles in traditional acupuncture points on the body and the needles were not manually moved and rotated.
After six months, patients answered questions about pain and functional ability and their scores determined how well each of the therapies worked.
In the real acupuncture group, 47 percent of patients improved. In the sham acupuncture group, 44 percent did. In the usual care group, 27 percent got relief.
To me it seems obvious that much of the pain relief comes from just *thinking* you’re going to get relief. The next question I’d have is, if you know that going in, do you need treatment at all? Or just think about getting treatment?
Chasing the Wind 
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