I disagree. If you are going to accept the placebo effect as a true measure of efficacy, then you open the door to every sugar pill and crazy idea that gives comfort. The placebo effect is a product of the mind rather than the result of the procedure in question. Acupuncture is an active placebo, with its protocol and such, and is therefore understandably a more convincing scam than a passive placebo such a sugar pill with no pomp or circumstance. But unless its effect is consistent across a double blind study, then it is not real. It is faith. And if faith gets you through an ordeal, then good for you. But call it what it is. Acupuncture does not meet the gold standard. If you choose to lower your standards, then that is your choice. As for your refence to the "logic" of acupuncture, properly conducted studies do not support it. Therefore, either the scientific process that has served the modern world so well is flawed, or the "logic" you refer to is flawed.
The important thing is know the difference between science and faith. From what I have read scientific dating is problematic and fundamentalist Christians have no support for the 6000 year old date. The next step of intellect is to have a bias. I suspect scientific dating has a better chance of being accurate than the 6000 year old number. Why? Because I know the the 6000 year old number comes form a monk in the middle ages who speculated about the length of missing generations.
Whatever you may have to say about science, the alternative is less than pretty. In betting parlance, science is where the smart money is.
granted, science is a good bet but does it always pay off/ p intuition drives knowledge and success not perfunction
Intuition, inspiration and imagination lead to discovery, which, when valid, is supported by science. It is no coincidence that charlatans thrive on the outskirts of science, bilking people by intuitively preying upon their fears and weaknesses. If only the victims of fraud were as wary of bullshit as they are of science...
That was partially my point. It may be faith, and given a problem where well-being of a patient is the solution, if faith achieves that well-being, then it is effective. As to double-blind results, I agree generally, but I would add that much of medicine is not science but art and trial and error. Physics is repeatable with certainty; there are many effects and results of medicine that are not well understood and not amenable to precise prediction. The fact that the placebo effect exists alone is proof of that. I am not claiming anything more for acupuncture, but I leave open the possibility that there are non-placebo effects not yet understood.
For those of you who would like to explore healing energy further. http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Energe...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247551740&sr=8-1
Well, some things, even made up crap, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. How about Obe Wan Kenobi, letting Darth kill him, claiming he would become more powerful than something or other?? You would have thought, he could just come back immediately, kick vader's ass and use the force to take out the stormtroopers. But nooooo...... He comes back as a ghost, who goes around giving new age rhetoric as advice?!? Yeah, reeeal powerful Obe. Epic fail.