MEDICAL RESEARCH & PUBLISHED FINDINGS

It must be said that some of my colleagues who work in acupuncture and other fields of traditional Chinese medicine can sometimes be a bit dismissive of, or confrontational with, conventional western medicine. I personally have no time for this and do not see what I do as being in competition with western medicine – in the same way that the Spanish and Italian languages are not in competition with each other and are simply different ways to achieve the same goal of communication.

However, it must also be said that some western medicine practitioners and commentators can be unfairly dismissive of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. It is often incorrectly said that there are no evidence-based studies or scientific research to support acupuncture, even though there are masses of published findings to the contrary.

To balance this, it can be pointed out that according to the British Medical Journal, the research findings behind current available conventional medical treatments can be categorised as such:

• 11% beneficial
• 24% likely to be beneficial
• 7% trade-off between benefits and harms
• 5% unlikely to be beneficial
• 3% likely to be ineffective or harmful
• 50% unknown

So we can see that conventional medicine is not as evidence-based as it claims to be. In addition, Prof John Ionannides, in a highly-cited and startling article, stated that most published research findings are false. A variety of reasons are put forward for this, including pressure from the pharmaceutical industry funding, poor research design, and simple bias.