Acupuncture - Endorsement By Medical Organizations

Endorsement By Medical Organizations

The United States Air Force set up the Air Force Acupuncture Center at the Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to practice and teach "battlefield acupuncture" to physicians and other medical personal to treat conditions such as PTSD and others. It is currently the only full-time acupuncture clinic in the Department of Defense.

In 2006, the NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine stated that it continued to abide by the pro-acupuncture recommendations of the 1997 NIH consensus statement, even if research is still unable to explain its mechanism.

The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a consensus statement on acupuncture in 1997 that concluded that despite research on acupuncture being difficult to conduct, there was sufficient evidence to encourage further study and expand its use. The consensus statement and conference that produced it were criticized by Wallace Sampson, founder of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, writing for an affiliated publication of Quackwatch who stated the meeting was chaired by a strong proponent of acupuncture and failed to include speakers who had obtained negative results on studies of acupuncture. Sampson also stated he believed the report showed evidence of pseudoscientific reasoning.

In 2003 the World Health Organization's Department of Essential Drugs and Medicine Policy produced a report on acupuncture. The report was drafted, revised and updated by Zhu-Fan Xie, the Director for the Institute of Integrated Medicines of Beijing Medical University. It contained, based on research results available in early 1999, a list of diseases, symptoms or conditions for which it was believed acupuncture had been demonstrated as an effective treatment, as well as a second list of conditions that were possibly able to be treated with acupuncture. Noting the difficulties of conducting controlled research and the debate on how to best conduct research on acupuncture, the report described itself as "...intended to facilitate research on and the evaluation and application of acupuncture. It is hoped that it will provide a useful resource for researchers, health care providers, national health authorities and the general public." The coordinator for the team that produced the report, Xiaorui Zhang, stated that the report was designed to facilitate research on acupuncture, not recommend treatment for specific diseases. The report was controversial; critics assailed it as being problematic since, in spite of the disclaimer, supporters used it to claim that the WHO endorsed acupuncture and other alternative medicine practices that were either pseudoscientific or lacking sufficient evidence-basis. Medical scientists expressed concern that the evidence supporting acupuncture outlined in the report was weak, and Willem Betz of SKEPP (Studie Kring voor Kritische Evaluatie van Pseudowetenschap en het Paranormale, the Study Circle for the Critical Evaluation of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal) said that the report was evidence that the "WHO has been infiltrated by missionaries for alternative medicine". The WHO 2005 report was also criticized in the 2008 book Trick or Treatment for, in addition to being produced by a panel that included no critics of acupuncture at all, containing two major errors – including too many results from low-quality clinical trials, and including a large number of trials originating in China where, probably due to publication bias, no negative trials have ever been produced. In contrast, studies originating in the West include a mixture of positive, negative and neutral results. Ernst and Singh, the authors of the book, described the report as "highly misleading", a "shoddy piece of work that was never rigorously scrutinized" and stated that the results of high-quality clinical trials do not support the use of acupuncture to treat anything but pain and nausea. Ernst also described the statement in a 2006 peer reviewed article as "Perhaps the most obviously over-optimistic overview ", noting that of the 35 conditions that the WHO stated acupuncture was effective for, 27 of the systematic reviews that the WHO report was based on found that acupuncture was not effective for treating the specified condition.

The National Health Service of the United Kingdom states "there is some scientific evidence that acupuncture is effective for a small number of health conditions"; that there is "reasonably good evidence that acupuncture is an effective treatment" for nausea, vomiting, osteoarthritis of the knee and several types of pain, but "because of disagreements over the way acupuncture trials should be carried out and over what their results mean, this evidence does not allow us to draw definite conclusions". Moreover, the NHS states that "some scientists believe that good evidence exists only for nausea and vomiting after an operation. Others think that there is currently not enough evidence to show that acupuncture works for any condition. More research is needed to investigate whether acupuncture works". The NHS also states there is evidence against acupuncture being useful for rheumatoid arthritis, smoking cessation and weight loss, and inadequate evidence of any efficacy for conditions such as addictions, asthma, chronic pain, depression, insomnia, neck pain, sciatica, shoulder pain, stroke, and tinnitus.

In Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research Health Information website, Brent Bauer M.D. stated "Many people who have chronic low back pain have found acupuncture to be helpful." He concludes "So if other treatments haven't helped your low back pain, it may be worth trying acupuncture." Regarding the use of Acupuncture for treating painful conditions in general, Mayo Clinic staff wrote "The benefits of acupuncture are sometimes difficult to measure, but many people find it helpful as a means to control a variety of painful conditions. ... Since acupuncture has few side effects, it may be worth a try if you're having trouble controlling pain with more-conventional methods."