So far – these studies have been negative.

It is possible to test acupunture with some blinding, but it can not be tested double-blind (as far as I know).

To say a therapy works is not to validate any concept of mechanism the practioner might want to promote.

Were you given that information direct from God?

You are recommending what the acupuncture proponents have started doing – backing off to lower grade unblinded trials because that is where they can get positive results. -

I can assure you that I am not interested in ‘made up’ treatments. I agree that you should not change your practice based on every study you see.
I am interested in what you are talking about and admit an ignorance of the use of CBT for this purpose-
Links for more info? please.

(Just a note- Quantum mechanics is actually physics- advances in science usually have something to do with physics.)

As someone who makes a living from treating people with back pain, I can tell you that I regard my profession a little more seriously than just uncritically accepting the results of every single article I see, and changing my practice based on the next new study. If you had back pain you could not generalize from the artificial situation of a clinical trial into real life, and you would NOT want me to give you a made up treatment, because that would prevent you from using the single most effective treatment modality for CLBP, which is cognitive-behaviour therapy.

The caveat for CBT being successful is that the back pain sufferer has to decide that the pain will be amenable to his/her own control, and that they can make changes to their beliefs and attitudes about their pain which will help them to do better in their lives. Simple, but definitely not easy. If you see (as I do so often every week ) people who with the best will in the world continue to seek a magical cure for a problem which will not be curable, you end up seeing them deprive themselves of opportunities to reduce their disability and get on with their lives. Decades of research in LBP have not gotten us as far as we would like, but there is a new tidal wave of sophisticated research on the way which may revolutionize the field the way that H2 anatgonists and the discovery of H Pylori revolutionized the understanding and treatment of stomach ulcers when I was a medical student.

These gains will not be make by magical thinking, and they will not be made by taking a wishful and whimsical approach to tackling the problem. I can personally guarantee you pec, that these advances will not be brought about by energy fields or have anything to do with quantum mechanics.

And other types of energy healing can be, and have been, studied using cell cultures, where of course no placebo is needed.

With those two statements in place, we have to agree that some therapies do not lend themselves to double-blind experimental protocols. (tmac57 makes the point well)

This does not automatically mean that those therapies are not useful.

The question is how to test the usefullness of the therapy that can’t be checked in a double-blind manner.

At some point, the patients statements as to well being and lack of pain are the only measures we can go by and -perhaps- the only measures that matter. Another measure that is of interest is mobility or flexability (they can be measured objectively) and more studies including those measures would be helpful.

One problem with the study of back pain, for example, is that we can take MRI’s of the patients and show them to the specialists, but the specialists won’t be able to tell us who is suffering with back pain. That is to say, the reason for the pain is currently not well understood. It is not outrageous to imagine that the reason for relief would be equally not well understood.

Nobody understands the ‘quantum tunnel effect’ well, but we can still use it to good result. Nobody really understands the ‘collapse of the wave function’ (or even if it happens), but the science that acknowledges that ignorance (physics) is still useful.

If I have pain I would want my doctor to recommend the treatment that the experiments show gets the best result. I really don’t care if it involves a magic wand. I would think most of the patients would agree with me on that.

I don’t think that the purpose of science is to give reasons why we must suffer pain without reason. I realize that nobody is advocating that, but sometimes it does seem that way.