Orac, from science blogs’s Respectful Insolance, brings to light a disturbing new trend in medicine; Woo invades the military.

Apparently, some German and American medics are (independently) exploring the use acupuncture to deal with pain. Despite the enthusiasm the military seems to have for this new program, they don’t seem to care much about waiting for research to discover if acupuncture is actually does what they say. It seems like this could be a potentially expensive and dangerous display of the placebo effect.

Ask Col. Richard Niemtzow, a radiation oncologist-turned acupuncturist for the Air Force how to deal with phantom pain of amputees and he’ll tell you to put needles into the ear, an organ closely associated with the central nervous system. The needles interfere with pain processing by interrupting and turning “the pathways.”

The above description, paraphrased from a quote, gives us immediate reason to doubt the credibility of acupuncture as a technique for dealing with pain, given the obvious lack of legitimate mechanism of operation. What’s worrying is that the armed forces are in no position to give up these unproven approaches to medicine. A $2 million was proportioned to the Samueli Institute for Information Biology to develop “a national program for evaluation and research on complementary, alternative and holistic medical practices (also called integrative medicine) for military personnel and veterans.”

I do not have a problem with holistic medicine, in principle, because I don’t believe that it is entirely without merit. However, proponents of ‘alternative medicine’ are consistently held to a lower standard of testing than pharmaceuticals. I would love it if researchers could come up with a whole slew of legitimate natural herbal supplements I could take.

However there’s a considerable lack of this research being done. Legitimate scientists often don’t care about holistic medicine and, what’s worse, researchers who already support holistic medicine go into conduct their studies with a subjective lens, and ‘miraculously’ discover exactly what they were expecting to.

Until there is systematic and rigorous approarch to alternative and holistic medicine, we would be wise to approach them cautiously. Or at least, refrain from using them on our soldiers until we can establish a scientific mechanism. I mean could you imagine if we built the Air Force’s planes and weapons with ‘alternate physics’?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10:36 pm and is filed under link out, medicine, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.