Getting Stuck by Junk Medicine

I was disappointed but hardly surprised when my mom directed me to an article in her local paper about acupuncture. The paper’s site has a subscription requirement (which would be fodder for another post as, unlike every other functionary on the internet after 1998, you cannot subscribe to the site with a credit card, you have to establish a direct deposit to you checking account—and people are puzzled about the failure of newspapers), so I will just quote the relevant portions.

The article was titled, “Sticking it to Traditional Medicine.” If that didn’t settle any doubts about the direction of the bias, the sub-heading reads, “Local chiropractor finds study of acupuncture rewarding.” So we have one voodoo artist, a chiropractor (who happens to be head of the Kansas Chiropractic Association), preaching about a different voodoo practice, acupuncture.

The article, which is primarily an advertisement for the chiropractor’s business (he recently received the necessary certification to practice acupuncture), is dripping with awe and reverence for the “5,000 year-old art.” I’m always amused by people using antiquity as a selling point for medical treatments. Because acupuncture is not science, it has no means of self-correction. It’s not like practitioners have discovered new ways to manipulate the body’s chi, because the body doesn’t have any. Thus, the “art” hasn’t discovered anything new in those 5,000 years. Sure, they might argue about different ways and places to stick the little needles, but they can’t give any sort of causal explanation for why. Nor have they ever attempted double blind studies aimed at sussing out the best methods. Thus, it exists fundamentally unchanged from its state 5,000 years ago. Imagine saying, “this toothpaste was used by the ancient Egyptians.” Wouldn’t the next reasonable question be, “what were their teeth like?”

That acupuncture has survived so long is interesting and impressive from a historical and cultural perspective, but think back to what life was like for a human 5,000 years ago. Hell, think about the state of medicine one hundred years ago. About 20% of children died before their first birthday, the average lifespan was around 40 years, and those that were lucky enough to make it into adulthood suffered from constant chronic pain. Acupuncture was available then, so why weren't people healthy?

How did traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, do against Yersinia pestis in the third pandemic in 1348-50? The Great Mortality blasted through China just as it did Europe, culling the population and bringing humanity closer to extinction than at any time since the last Ice Age. Yet I'm supposed to rely on these same treatments now?

The logic drives me insane. All of the wonderful gains in human health made over the past century should prove the uncontested superiority of Western medicine. But the substantive medical issues with acupuncture are being dealt with by researchers and scientists much more qualified than I, so I will move to focus on the sneaky argumentative techniques found in my mother's paper. It was informative in so far as it displayed a number of common techniques used by alt-med proponents to seduce new clients.

The article begins, as most of these things do, with a reasoned, science-minded man skeptical of the effectiveness of this alien healing method:

It was difficult to wrap my head around it, being educated in Western science. But once you’ve experienced it, you know that it really does work.

Now, it bears repeating that our champion of Western science is a chiropractor, so the science learnin’ clearly didn’t make much of an impression, or if it did, it didn’t stick. But we have our every-man to identify with. If he was skeptical and it worked for him, hell, it just might work for me! A quick survey of QVC will give you plenty of make-up caked women in floral patterned dresses using the same shtick to sell gaudy baubles and detergent.

But that’s not enough, we need some facts to back up our story:

No one knows for sure whether acupuncture works using the Chinese theory of chi or whether it is effective because of Western science’s suggestion that it uses the body’s own natural endorphans to combat pain. But the one thing most of the scientific community agrees upon is that acupuncture can be a beneficial form of treatment for a large variety of physical and mental issues.

Most of the scientific community? Hmm, that doesn’t sound right. The author defends this dubious claim by referencing two “studies.” The first is a 1997 National Institute of Health report. The author of the article doesn't give any specific citation, so I have to assume that she means this. It turns out that it wasn’t so much a report as a conference summary. The NIH invited a bunch of alt-med “researchers” to present their work. They didn’t manage to extend the courtesy to a single scientist who found negative results in studying acutpuncture.

So what we have is the exponential use of fake authority to cloud bad data. We begin with multiple alt-med proponents, each of whom cannot, on their own, present convincing evidence. A bunch of these individually inadequate shamans are gathered under the umbrella of the NIH (an organization with the word “health” right in the title), and their speeches are summarized and offered to the public as a “report” validating the usefulness of acupuncture. Now every reporter, student, or alt-med supporter can just read the abstract, cite the NIH, and claim that scientific studies prove the potency of acupuncture.

Unfotunately for the alt-med community, they seem to have as much trouble with math as they do with science. No matter how many powers it’s raised, when you start with zero, you end with zero.

Here's what the scientific community actually says about the practice:

Acupuncture is an unproven treatment. The best studies of acupuncture show that it is no more effective than placebos(inactive treatments.) The NIH panel was conceived in all likelihood with an agenda to promote the acceptance of acupuncture by the public, press, insurance plans, HMOs and Federal and state medical plans.

That was Dr. Wallace Sampson, M.D., Editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and Clinical Professor of Medicine at Stanford University.

The second, and most suspiciously, is a 2007 World Health Organization “data report” that cites “multiple scientific studies on the subject.” Because there was also no clear citation for that report, I was unable to find exactly what the author was talking about. I did, however, find a 2003 report by the WHO's Department of Essential Drugs and Medicine Policy. Assuming this is what the author was talking about, the report was burdened with a number of methodological errors, the most glaring of which being the mission statement by the report's author, Dr. Zhang, "...to show acupuncture works."

The rest of the Mercury article is directed at assuaging the public’s fear of needles. Apparently they aren’t as big and scary as the hypodermic ones we're used to. Whew.

So what we're left with is an advertisement published as a newspaper article with dubious citation and sham reports as supporting data. Standard operating procedure, it seems.