sorry for tarding up the thread guys
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cha59
- acupuncture - does nothing. ok. Maybe the one time I had dry needles it was a placebo effect. I was never really an advocate of that anyway, and have never and would never seek it out.
I have staked hours upon hours to do pain research. I think I probably should have focused more on the bio mechanics of the human body but I took the line of looking at what pain really is.
Pain pathways are interesting. In some way they start off like other touch receptors and signaling events inside the brain. Entering up the spinal cord through the dorsal ganglia and into the thalamus. After this, it's problem. Three regions seem important in pain perception namely
Insular Cortex,
Somatosensory Cortex and
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC).
In western medicine, two of the most conservative forms of pain relief are
NSAIDs and
Opioid Analgesics
NSAIDs - they stop the secondary messengers molecules, basically inhibiting enzymes like Cyclooxygenase and thus stopping the synthesis of Prostaglandin - which has a strong effect in changing physical properties of smooth muscles like contraction and relaxation. Thus, trying to inhibit processes that lead to pain perception at the peripheral nervous system.
Opioid Painkillers - Act upon opiod receptors in the central and peripharal nervous system. Although the actual mechanism of action of opioids is not fully understood, we know they act on opioid receptors present all over the nervous system because when patients are given
Naloxone - a opioid antagonist, the effect of opioid medicine is essentially blocked.
There is also the effect of
Endorphins - small peptide chains formed in the Pitutary gland and Hypothalmus that also act upon the opioid receptors.
Now there are obviously more drastic ways of reducing pain through surgeries. There are now methods like putting a probe in your Dorsal Horn that gives electrical signals to activate/deactivate it. Or even more aggressive is to cut pathways in the dorsal horn or even the ACC
. These methods are obviously for those in excruciating chronic pain, but at least they are being refined.
This primer on pain is useful in understanding the
Placebo effect. In studies, not only does the placebos given to patient work in a subjective manner, they actually really work. When patients who are reporting pain relief after placebo were given the same
Naloxone, their reporting changed. They did not report any relief from the placebo. From this we can infer that placebos actually trigger mechanisms in the brain that give relief from pain.
Acupuncture
On the face of it - it's non medical and it doesn't have any basis in western medicine and it turns out in control trials, when people have looked carefully at acupuncture for treating pain, organ problems etc etc, it appears to not really work well for treating most medical problems, but there is an exception - Acupuncture in control trials works better than control treatments for treating chronic pains and for nausea, and in particular what was found is, that sticking a needle into acupuncture points appears to lead to some degree of chronic pain and nausea relief relative to putting the needle in the wrong place. Even to take a telescopic needle that appears to be going into the skin but doesn't actually go in, acupuncture needles tend to do better than those controls for treating pain.
Now, as anklebreaker mentioned that this could just be the placebo effect, what that link on the sciencebasedmedicine does not mention is whether these patients were later given Naloxone to see if it indeed was just the placebo. They probably weren't or else it would be mentioned but that is obviously one way to rule out the placebo effect in acupuncture.
It's clear that the stated reason in acupuncture is that there is this energy flow namely Chi energy, and somehow this Chi flow is manipulable through these needles. Now this wrong because there is no measured difference in heat and electric field strength when you stick an acupuncture needle in. Therefore on the face of it, the Chi concept doesn't seem to work.
The other reason people resort to is that the sensation of needles pricking your skin might cause the excretion of Endorphins and that could also give a degree of pain relief. The final argument for Acupuncture is that since the brain stem is a crowded place, there is some spilling over or cross-talk between signals and for some reason the signals coming in from acupuncture are being perceived as those that are for pain relief. These are the areas of open investigation but like that link on sciencebasedmed stated - then we'd pretty much have to also test whether rubbing your elbow can be mistakenly perceived as hitting it hard on something.
Conclusion: Pain is just another perception derived from sense information just like touch or pressure etc but has its own brain specific regions and consequently it can be controlled in a variety of ways. Pain is a combination of events and the mechanisms we use to interpret events and these mechanisms can be modulated through drugs, through our mental states like meditation, through surgery etc. Acupuncture is basically clinging on to some far reaching assertions where testing it is getting harder and it is resorting to special pleading or the 'dragon-in-my-garage' type logical fallacies.
In the end, critical thinking can only lead us to ever increasing certitude of probabilities and once a claim becomes un-falsifiable, it is out of the realm of scientific investigation and *should* generally be regarded as false.
Last edited by SenseiSingh; 03-27-2014 at 06:07 AM.