Interesting.
I've personally had acupuncture at a student clinic while I was studying, and noticed a huge difference between two practitioners.
I got better pain reduction results and felt a zip of electricity on placement of the needles from the student who was very careful about land marking than I did from the student who seemed to rush the placement.
It's hard to do studies of this kind of treatment on people, we come to the table with bias.
Some in the control "sham" group will believe that it acupuncture will work, while some in the treatment group will believe that acupuncture will not work, and vice versa.
Also, the two tests will seem very similar to the uninitiated, maybe this shows that meridians aren't important in placement.
Acupuncture has also beaten the effects of aspirin in a study, though sometimes I'd bet that a glass of water would work as well with a sugar pill as with an aspirin but we're not eager to attribute all of the effects of Aspirin as a placebo (dehydration -> headache).
I wish I could still access online full text research and read the papers myself.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Acupuncture beats aspirin chronic headache/1021220/story.html
I think the rats in the following studies probably had no previous bias and the results cannot be chalked up to placebo.
Effect of acupuncture on behavioral hyperactivity and dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens in rats sensitized to morphine
Neuroscience Letters
Volume 387, Issue 1, 14 October 2005, Pages 17-21
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0G-4GSBFR1-4&_user=10
&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3937201f77613a80fca3ffc876233b72
Acupuncture analgesia in a new rat model of ankle sprain pain.
Pain. 2002 Oct;99(3):423-31. (I've read this myself for a Podiatry class project on alternative medicine)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12406517?dopt=AbstractPlus
Last edited by a moderator: Jan 27, 2009