For those who think acupuncture is just a metal thingy that pokes you...

OK. So, acupuncture's been in the news a lot lately, more than ever. Talk show hosts are inviting acupuncturists to, you know, talk about what they do. They even have acupuncture as a regular thing on t.v. serials, like Eli Stone.

Even researchers are paying more attention to it, specifically the Cochrane Review, which looks at all studies pertaining to acupuncture and its effects on a particular condition, compounds the results, and analyzes them. And the latest buzz is that "sham acupuncture" (needling "fake" points) is as good as the real thing (needling points that are documented in text books), and that either is better than other therapies.

Here's the latest from the BBC on acupuncture and headaches.

On the surface it seems like good news for the acupuncture profession. I mean, it works, right?--even if you don't really need to go to school for four years to get your masters degree, since sticking a needle anywhere will work.

Yeah, well, not exactly. First and foremost, when researchers prepare a study à la the scientific method, the only way to do it is to test an hypothesis, which means they have to study the effect of needling the same acupuncture point or set of acupuncture points on everyone's headache, for example. But acupuncture is a part of Chinese medicine, and Chinese medicine will *always* tell you that different people need different treatments: We're unique, we have different DNA, different diets, different lifestyles, different "hiccups" in our well-being over the years. Why shouldn't we get unique treatments tailored specifically for us? And yet, the scientific method declares that acupuncture cannot be studied if we treat people as individuals.

So...Conclusion #1: It's not that sham acupuncture is as good as real acupuncture; it's that it's all bad acupuncture in these studies.

Second, research on acupuncture requires that different practitioners will provide the exact same needling to different patients in the exact same locations. Hmmm. Not quite sure how that's going to happen, when you have (again) different people of different heights (you can't measure three inches from, say, the navel, cause you'll end up proportionally in a different place on each person), or different weights (stick a needle in 1 mm on a morbidly obese person and it hasn't gone into the same level of tissue on the body as a really thin person). This is not to mention differences in education or needling style of the practitioners in the study.

Conclusion #2: It's all bad acupuncture.

Third and last (I promise), acupuncture is not about this piece of metal that's somehow doing the healing. It's not about sticking a patient and causing pain so there's a release of endorphins or opioids in the body. It's about connecting with a person's Qi, their life force, something that cannot be seen on an MRI or measured with a volt meter. It's about utilizing a powerful tool (the needle) to focus the practitioner's Qi in order to guide the patient's Qi, and to awaken a person's innate ability to heal oneself.

Conclusion #3: You have to take the human out of the equation to do the scientific method, but there is no way to take the human out of true Chinese medicine.

And the moral of this story? If you want real acupuncture, see a real acupuncturist, and stay away from the studies.