Ask & You Will Get It Series: Is Acupuncture a Placebo?

Acupuncture is a significant type of method for healing used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The mechanism that it works is based on a strong foundational system of TCM theory, thus giving rise to its high treatment efficacy and its spread to China for thousands of years.

At this point in time, acupuncture has stepped out into the global market and foreign countries have already started to perform a lot of scientific research in acupuncture. Because of these researches, we have developed a deeper understanding in the acupuncture mechanisms. However among all of these foreign scientific researches, not all credit positive results and conclusions to acupuncture. One of which is the claim that ‘acupuncture is just a placebo’.

To investigate this claim, we need to understand the concept of placebo, how the investigation of whether acupuncture is a placebo is carried out and if such investigation is done in a fair and scientific manner for such claims to be made.

Concept of Placebo

Placebo usually refers to the drug control group used in drug clinical trials. It is often made of substances with no medicinal effects and also no toxic side effects. The substances that made up placebo can be glucose, starch and the appearance of placebo is similar to the real medicine. Placebo effect, also known as the sham medicine effect or surrogate effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the patient “expects” or “believes” that the treatment will be effective despite receiving an ineffective treatment and yet the patient’s symptoms are relieved.

How investigation to find out if Acupuncture is a placebo is carried out

With acupuncture being often regarded as ‘just a placebo’, most foreign researchers think that such accusation can only be refuted by sham acupuncture controlled trials. Within these sham acupuncture controlled trials, they mainly explore if acupuncture has specific curative effects beyond that of the placebo. For the control group in such sham acupuncture controlled trials, there are two major conditions to be satisfied: the placebo or sham control should have no effects at all on the human body; and the trial subjects and doctors should be in a double-blinded state during the trial.

Problems with sham acupuncture controlled trials that lead to misleading results and conclusions

However, the above mentioned two conditions in the sham acupuncture controlled trials are difficult to implement and not yet fully standardized.

Problem 1: Blinding

Problem 2: Control group should have no effect at all on the human body

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