He then left me alone in a dark room being hit with little surges of electricity at measured spaces while he apparently went out for a smoke (he stunk of tobacco upon returning).

Something must’ve been glitchy with the machine because shortly after he left, the electricity would surge and “hold” my back muscles in a rigid state that was quite painful. I was also getting a mild shock. I shouted for help (and for longer than I wished) before he returned and turned off the juice. My massage was ruined, he claimed this had never happened before and would not give me a refund or even deduct from the $110 fee for my pain.

While he was pulling the little needles out of my back, his wife/biz partner was attempting to sell me on purchasing her services for “Spiritual Counseling” (after my trauma, I must’ve appeared to need it) and my favorite, “Cellular Memory Work”. I still have no idea what that was supposed to do for me, but let her know that I was not that interested right at the moment.

I later checked his “creds” online (should’ve done it before going – I know, I know – but I trusted my son’s OT) and discovered that our state does “credential” acupuncturists. This guy was less than a month away from having his credential lapse. I guess he needed my $110 to pay the fee.

I complained afterward to the state and it didn’t mean anything since it’s such a goofy and unregulated “regulated” business. Claims of study in China are difficult to verify. How do you know if the person passed/failed whatever if the license is written in Chinese characters and looks as if it could be purchased in a back alley calligraphy shop.

Chalk it up to “learning the hard way” and “adventures in quack medicine”.

Also, I would bet you technically CAN vibrate an inserted needle at 20hz by hand. It just won’t be comparable to the way the authors did it. I could easily imaging that rubbing, scratching, tapping, releasing (a sort of “twang” effect) and otherwise handling a needle will generate a wild range of unstable, shifting frequencies…basically noise, as with handling any object…some more than others… I’m sure those frequencies would often swing through that 20-50hz range. But the amount of real time spent at those frequencies would be very small, and they would occur randomly, and the volume would vary, and…you get the idea.

No, it’s not comparable in any useful way to what the authors did. But watch for one of them pointing out that you can SO make a needle vibrate at a few dozen hertz by hand, which proves unequivocally that their proven placebo works by not being a placebo!

Stay safe in the hurricane.

I found the articles by a search for “regulation of homeopathy” on Westlaw (a legal research tool) under Law Reviews and Journals. Here are some notable results, so you can see what sorts of things law professors are arguing for:

Michael H. Cohen, Holistic Health Care: Including Alternative and Complementary Medicine in Insurance and Regulatory Schemes, 38 Ariz. L. Rev. 83 (Spring, 1996) (a credulous article coming from my own Law Review, I’m afraid);
Lori B. Andrews, The Shadow Health Care System: Regulation of Alternative Health Care Providers, 32 Hous. L. Rev. 1273 (1996) (also credulous, arguing for relaxing regulatory standards to allow greater access to CAM);
Barbara L. Atwell, Mainstreaming Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the Face of Uncertainty, 72 UMKC L. Rev. 593 (2004) (including the following quote: “Given the fact that some conventional medical treatments are of questionable efficacy, it is inappropriate for health insurers to deny coverage for CAM treatments because their effectiveness is also uncertain at times.”).

There are many more along the same vein. Looking at the results again, I think it’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of Law Review articles I’m finding are credulous. Then there is the worst article, which I mentioned before as arguing that juries should decide scientific questions. Michael S. Jacobs, Testing the Assumptions Underlying the Debate About Scientific Evidence: A Closer Look at Juror “Incompetence” and Scientific “Objectivity,” 25 Conn. L. Rev. 1083 (1993).

I did find one article by an author apparently familiar with the skeptical literature. Patrick L. Sheldon, The Truth About Homeopathy: A Discussion of the Practice and the Dangers That Inhere, 8 Quinnipiac Health L.J. 289 (2005).

This isn’t something to freak out about. The proper response I think would be for a skeptical scientists, maybe someone from SBM, to co-author an article with a law professor or practitioner mainly explaining why legal professionals lack the necessary expertise to deal with these issues and present an “alternative” viewpoint on how legal professionals can contribute.

That is the mechanism for regulation of blood pressure, shear at the vessel wall activates eNOS, generates NO and causes dilatation until the shear matches the setpoint.

Shear in fluid in the voids in bone is the mechanism for activating NOS on bone strain which generates NO and regulates deposition of bone mineral at sites with the highest NO which have the highest strain.

Whole body oscillation causes increases in whole body NO levels.

A hypothesis I have for the peripheral neuropathy that accompanies long term work-related vibration exposure is that the vibration does increase the local NO level, but then physiology compensates by removing that excess NO via inflammation and generation of superoxide. When the vibration is no longer present, then the NO level is too low and the nerves don’t work properly. The time constant for the regulation of the NO/superoxide balance isn’t fast enough to compensate.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18955588

The other problem is that the low NO state has hysteresis and is difficult to get back to the normal high NO state without the normal exogenous source of NO from skin bacteria which generate NO from sweat. Hands and paws have a very high density of sweat glands.

Low NO could be a final common pathway in a number of peripheral neuropathies, diabetic neuropathy and those associated with vascular and wound healing deficits (low NO causes those symptoms too).

What this means for acupuncture, if this is the mechanism, then acupuncture could have side effects like those from vibration induced injury. It also means the needle isn’t necessary, breaking the skin isn’t necessary, the meridians are not necessary and another and better regulated source of NO would work better (like my bacteria ).

Steve, as always I love your breakdowns of acupuncture studies. Each time they play a new game with the results and it’s always interesting/funny/sad to see their work dissected so thoroughly. I have a fondness for this as I was introduced to applying scientific critical thinking to pseudoscience by a great endocrinology professor who would assign midnight miracle-cure commercials as homework. The activity is so much fun and I am always surprised at how much there is to learn about the scientific process itself. Acupuncture studies seem particularly suited as there could be an actual effect from a needle going through skin, but how well blinded is the study? Is the statistical analysis mining the data too far? Do the controls actually control for the experiment? By the time the issue is ferreted out, we’ve all had a great review of the basics and how easy it is for even good scientists to forget them.

By the way, that’s my favorite opening line to any of your blog posts.