Hey, somebody wants to provide funding that can be used to teach lots of students how to do research, that can be used to discredit quackery? Sounds awesome!
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Nope. You didn’t read my words closely enough. But “many” isn’t “all”. “Most” isn’t “all”.
Fact: many studies on acupuncture cannot be used to draw meaningful conclusions about its efficacy, because the studies are of poor quality or lead to contradictory results.
Also fact: some high quality studies exist, and some show clear conclusions. They demonstrate that it either doesn’t do anything, or, if it does, it’s just a placebo effect for pain management that never treats the real underlying conditions. The studies you keep suggesting do not exist do, in fact exist. And they say it do anything real.
Here is the abstract, in full, from a metaanalysis (a systematic review and critical analysis of lots of reviews), published in Pain in 2011, regarding the ability of acupuncture to manage pain:
Acupuncture is commonly used for pain control, but doubts about its effectiveness and safety remain. This review was aimed at critically evaluating systematic reviews of acupuncture as a treatment of pain and at summarizing reports of serious adverse effects published since 2000. Literature searches were carried out in 11 databases without language restrictions. Systematic reviews were considered for the evaluation of effectiveness and case series or case reports for summarizing adverse events. Data were extracted according to predefined criteria. Fifty-seven systematic reviews met the inclusion criteria. Four were of excellent methodological quality. Numerous contradictions and caveats emerged. Unanimously positive conclusions from more than one high-quality systematic review existed only for neck pain. Ninety-five cases of severe adverse effects including 5 fatalities were included. Pneumothorax and infections were the most frequently reported adverse effects. In conclusion, numerous systematic reviews have generated little truly convincing evidence that acupuncture is effective in reducing pain. Serious adverse effects continue to be reported.
And that’s a conclusion about the only thing that even those who practice acupuncture can agree that it’s truly any good for: pain relief, temporary treatment of symptoms rather than causes.
Why is that something we need to study further? There are thousands of papers in the literature on acupuncture. If there were something real to find, it would have been found by now. You are in favour of wasting further hundreds of millions of dollars and further thousands of person hours on studying something for which there is no viable mechanism by which it could work, and which has already been demonstrated not to work except as a placebo.
Or maybe, instead, we could spend that time and money on something that will actually help people.
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So despite, as you say, the vast majority of studies on alternate medicines being “shit for quality” with “fuzzy conclusions”, you feel that we shouldn’t ever study alternate medicines again, because there’s been a small number of good ones.
Because, as you say, it hasn’t been studied well, and the good studies have shown great promise for its use in pain relief.
That’s… the point. Studying under-studied medicines at a purpose-built facility could help find benefits we don’t know of yet, rather than wade through, as you say, thousands of pages of fuzzy data. Or it could prove them to be conclusively useless, which is also extremely helpful to know. But blurry conclusions help nobody.
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They help the corporate pill pushers!
If you were to seriously study “alternative medicine” a great deal of it would be disproven and a great deal of it would become “regular medicine” - or at least that’s what’s always happened so far. Again & again & again…
And finding solutions to medical problems, especially solutions that don’t involve a lifetime of expensive daily pills, is simply not profitable to large corporations.
Thus, billions of dollars are spent to maintain the illusion that all medicine that didn’t come out of a shiny corporate lab is a single monolithic block of nonsense, that must not even be differentiated, much less researched. For example - all homeopathy is dilution homeopathy is an article of faith, not of reason, that must never be questioned.
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“Hi honey, I’ll be home a bit later tonight, I have to take the car in for an essential oil change.”
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But there already have been plenty of studies of acupuncture, and they’ve all concluded that acupuncture is functionally equivalent to a placebo. How many more studies do you require?
Why do we need to study things for which no plausible mechanism exists to explain the believed effects? Maybe we should be studying leprechauns living in the gut as the source of diabetes! Don’t be so closed minded, Trumpy McTrumperton!
I feel you don’t really understand statistics?
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The placebo effect is BS. I hear it doesn’t work any better than a placebo.
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If your intent was to suggest that “shit for quality” studies that produce “fuzzy conclusions” are all that we need, bolstered by a message board, your link isn’t exactly a helpful definition of ‘good, clinically-based statistics’, which i hope that quality studies can provide.
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No, the link was a separate but related point.
There are numerous well conducted studies, including some excellent ones. At best they collectively show that acupuncture is worthless. Those studies are statistically significant. Could they individually and collectively be wrong? Well, sure. They could be. But it’s vanishingly unlikely.
Meanwhile we know that acupuncture is causing harm, up to and including death.
So tell me again why you think it’s worth spending more money on studying acupuncture, as opposed to - say - spending that money repairing a sidewalk, or buying some social housing, or upgrading a school’s facilities?
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Much props to the Tim Min, but …cannabis. Medicine? Alternative/Natural medicine?
That is the exact opposite of what other posters here have said. So either it’s had lots of excellent studies proving its worthlessness, or most of the studies have been terrible and the results are vague at best. I’m unclear which, which is why I think that well-funded studies on it and other poorly-studied alternative approaches would be helpful.
So is all of Western medicine, in far greater percentages, every single day. I doubt there’s a single person here who doesn’t know someone who received poor “approved, generally regarded as wonderful” medical care that resulted in harm, up to and including death. So that’s not exactly a helpful metric for never using alternate approaches.
Well, it’s quite literally going to upgrade the school’s facilities, in that the $200m is for a new building with new labs and new equipment.
And once again, I think that it could benefit from being studied. It’s quite clear that nobody here knows the actual facts around whether it’s a well-studied subject or a poorly-studied one, and they’re pulling facts out of the air (and Google) to score points on the BBS. This fellow’s money is going towards medical education, and one part of that is a topic you don’t care for. I’m sure some people would argue that parts of Western medicine are over-studied and that things like integrated medicine and herbal care could use more funding, which this provides.
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That is actually not true. Flat out false statement, although I can see how you’d get the wrong idea if you hang around here 
.
Well, because that is how the majority of scientific progress has been made in human history. Observation reveals things that do not fit accepted theory, investigation suggests avenues of experimentation, followed by discovery that inspires new theories - that is science.
Refusing to even consider outré theories because you’ve already reached a conclusion without research or experimentation? That’s faith, not science!
This modern idea that you have to have a description of a thing before you can science it sort of weirds me out. I have literally met NASA scientists who believe it, and it’s illogical in the extreme.
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aaaaaand here we have the edifying example of two people who left their minds so open their brains fell out …
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Hmmm. You’ll forgive me if flat out reject the validity of that site.
You learn something new every day.
This seems like the kind of thing that would have saved Hemingway and his siblings (from suicide, at least).
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ETA: this got stuck in my queue 12h ago, and I might be late to the party. Anyway.
I would think this the Cochrane foundation would disagree on this.
Ernst, Edzard (2009). “Acupuncture: What Does the Most Reliable Evidence Tell Us?”. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. 37 (4): 709–714.
Acupuncture, like homeopathy, is using a pseudo-scientific woo vocabulary and trains it’s practitioners by that. (Granted, there are some practitioners who don’t use that vocabulary.) And the historical record of homeopathic practices isn’t really helpful, but rather in the way. I would only argue humorously that humorism is something to be researched thoroughly because it being a practice which is centuries old. (Sidenote: culturally, there are many practices in local folk medicines all across Europe which are firmly based in humorism. Some of them even work. But that’s despite the erroneous explanation why they work, and doesn’t validate humorism as a discipline. My grandmother firmly believed, for one thing, that quark wrappings (between linnen towels. It had to be linnen!) around your legs would pull out the bad juices which make you feverish.
My mother still used that stuff on me, without the humoral explanation.
I used gel packs, or just wet towels.
The effect, of course, is measurable in each case, and isn’t on par with placebos, but better. My point is: the explanation differs, a lot. And if you base a whole branch of medicine, or at least of treatments, on a pseudo-scientific explanation, the likelihood to err in many applications due to fallacious reasoning is very high.
In case of acupuncture I think the effects have been shown not to be significantly different from placebos. Combined with the pseudo-scientific bullshit surrounding it, this places acupuncture in a field where certainly some quotes of Tim Minchin could be applied…
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No studies that find a measurable effect beyond that of a placebo, eh?
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/reference/acupuncture/#research
Scientific studies exist to test hypotheses which posit mechanisms or effects, and while it’s not strictly necessary for these mechanisms or effects to have at least some basis within existing scientific knowledge base, if they don’t then it’s sufficient reason to be particularly skeptical in evaluating their merit for study. That’s not faith, it’s thinking skeptically and using resources responsibly.
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Sciencism, everyone’s new favorite religion. 
As a nondualist, I have no problem reconciling objective materialism and subjective immaterialism. I’m impervious to all! Heheh
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Yes, that is a study-of-studies from nearly a decade ago, which determined, “The conditions that are most solidly backed up by evidence are chemotherapy-induced nausea/vomiting, postoperative nausea/vomiting, and idiopathic headache.”
I’d think that a drug-free method of relieving any of those things would be massively beneficial to patients, and a new clinical study for those indications could really be helpful.
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Ah, Not True Scotsmen, are they?
“The unrealistically high percentage of positive studies makes the Chinese body of clinical literature very suspect.”
Definitely not Scotsmen.
I think it’s interesting that Chinese studies are usually oriented towards finding out if acupuncture is a valid treatment for some condition, while non-Chinese studies are often oriented towards disproving what @LutherBlisset insightfully called “a pseudo-scientific woo vocabulary*”. For example, the link that I just quoted, which @uniqueusername references above, says “A thorough review of published studies reveals that there is no evidence for the existence of either acupuncture points or meridians as discrete entities.” Well, no duh.
We better not research this stuff. It would harm the profit margins of certain corporations, and besides we might get cooties. Chinese cooties.
* an assessment I would thoroughly agree with if I wasn’t allergic to the shibboleth word woo.
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