Acupuncture placebo

One of the factors that influence the magnitude of the placebo effect is the way in which the placebo is administered. Placebo injections, for example, are more effective than placebo pills and placebo acupuncture - which uses sham needles that retract into their handles like the blade of a stage dagger, rather than piercing the skin - is also more effective than placebo pills.19 The most powerful placebo of all is surgery. Approximately 45 per cent of patients with Parkinson s disease get better when treated with sham surgery, but only 14 per cent of Parkinson s disease patients improve when treated with placebo pills.20... 

Kaptchuk returned from China a proponent of acupuncture and wrote The Web That Has No Weaver, the classic explanation of Chinese medicine for Western readers.3 But over time he came to wonder whether the effects of acupuncture might be at least partly due to the placebo effect. To answer that question, he taught himself how to design research studies, and he did so well enough to obtain funding from the National Institutes of Health and publish more than ioo articles in leading medical journals. No wonder Harvard saw fit to hire and promote him, despite his rather unusual academic credentials. 

Of that starting group, 141 patients completed the trial 72 got acupuncture and 69 received the sham treatment or placebo. Immediately after the subjects received acupuncture, their blood pressure fell from an average of 131/81 to 125/78, but the sham treatment had no impact during a twenty-four-hour period. When patients were tested three and six months later, however, there were no residual effects from the acupuncture treatment. 

Acupuncture has been tried in many studies as a treatment of asthma and other respiratory conditions associated with cough. The results are highly inconsistent (Ernst et al. 2006). Symptomatic treatment of cough itself has seldom been studied. One study showed that acupuncture worked significantly better than conventional medicine in asthma (Maa et al. 2003). However, none of the studies were blinded or adequately controlled to test for placebo effect. 

Each opioid has an individual, characteristic receptor binding profile. Apart from controlling pain, opioid peptides also have an impact on emotional life. Pain relief using acupuncture or from placebo preparations is attributable to these compounds in the same way as is euphoria while running a marathon. 

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