Where meat meets metal: How acupuncture works. Or doesn’t.

By Thomas Gentry
Article ID: 1254

 

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Right down the road from my house, there’s a store selling and promoting homeopathy and acupuncture. I’ve spent a couple dozen hours collecting information about the place and what it sells so that I can give an accurate depiction of its beliefs and worth. In the next few paragraphs I’ll expound on why this alternative modality of medicine is another case of people taking money for a service they can’t render. I’ll use text from their own website and combine this with the knowledge and critical thinking skills I have acquired from past studies. When addressed critically, this undermines the practitioners’ intellectual credibility and their entire profession.

I’m not a particularly well-read or knowledgeable person; I don’t have specific knowledge of any field in appreciable depth. What I do have is years of training and practice in trying to spot lies and chicanery. In this case, I don’t need in-depth knowledge of any specific medical modality. If I needed detailed knowledge of every topic to judge the validity of its claims, I would still be stuck on making and learning the proofs for addition, multiplication, and subtraction–don’t even get me started on division.

Using the filtering processes afforded to me by the rules of logic, I gauge a topic by the unlikelihood of its claims. The reference material for acupuncture sets off nearly every “red flag” I have acquired over the years, leading me to judge it as an extremely unlikely candidate for efficacy. Right from the “get go”, if you do a search on the natural history of acupuncture you find claims like “It is based on the theory that a life force called Qi [pronounced 'chee'] flows through the body along certain channels, which if blocked can cause illness.” That particular red flag is called the logical fallacy of “magical thinking.” The magical thinking proponent says something meaningless, and allows the listener to fill in any logical gaps. Like how this “life force” works, what it is, or what is blocking it. How does the insertion of needles fix this blockage? This method of boondoggling doesn’t work once you have the trained habit of forming questions when information is presented. It’s as simple as asking, “how does this statement explain the claim?”

If we can get past the first premise of this Chinese ideology (which already leap-frogs past rationality), the literature abounds with examples of lazy thinking. For instance, the claim that “acupuncture has been practiced for up to 5,000 years in the Orient” added to this claim of, “the evidences for acupuncture’s effectiveness are adding up.” In five thousand years, there’s not enough data to link a cause and effect! What disheveled mind could make both of these claims without seeing the two statements are nearly incompatible, unless the writer means to say “the evidence has been building for 5,000 years, but we don’t want to be too expedient in our proclamation of acupuncture’s worth.” That’s only five hundred decades without a sensible explanation of acupuncture’s cause and effect.

Today’s strongest claims have no link between cause and effect. The acupuncture peddlers themselves can’t definitively explain their treatment. I found at least four separate and distinct ideas proposed as the underlying method of how acupuncture works. I’d like to specifically address two of these:

Endorphins

The body reacts to pain and intrusion by releasing feel-good drugs that lessen the pain. That one sounds fairly straight-forward, probably because it doesn’t mention Qi. It refers to an actual, measurable, chemical process of the body. But why insert needles all over your body when you could just take these same chemicals in pill form? If this acupuncture claim really is correct, the entire process has been outmoded by modern pharmacology!

Magic

The next idea listed on my local acupuncturists’ website was, “inserting a needle into the body’s connective tissue…signals the brain to direct healing energy.” Is it just me, or did they just say “it’s magic.” That’s the magical thinking logical fallacy–again; what is “healing energy”? They claim the brain produces it, but what type of cell synthesizes it? Why do we need it in acupuncture but not in vaccines?

The entire acupuncture field is based on blatant illogical claims. Could a complex system of interacting parts like an engine be built from the basic premise, “inserting gasoline into the cars manifold metals…signals the engine to direct driving energy at the tires“? I worry about credibility when a legally-certified acupuncturist writes, “While theories abound regarding how acupuncture works, the growing evidence is that it works“. These people don’t even claim to know how acupuncture works, but they claim they successfully use it. Do you think a surgeon has ever made a similar claim? Such as, “I don’t know how the heart works, but I’ll do surgery on it.”

Like so many other “ancient Chinese secrets” this one relies on magic to pull everything together. From its premise that Qi exists, to the mysterious mechanism of the brain lobbing healing energy at injuries–only after you have been poked by steel needles — this modality assumes magic is real, and people are dumb. But, people aren’t dumb. Once they hear a whisper of dissent, they remember. They start looking a little harder at the brochures in their doctor’s office. It only takes time and information to realize acupuncturists are selling crap; and you can’t buy it.

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