Court forcing 16 yr old with cancer into chemo

[tracilicious]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

By no stretch of the imagination has acupuncture been proven effective. You can't even get various practitioners to agree on which points do what things or which diseases are amenable to treatment.

Similarly with most "herbal" treatments. If they had been proven effective (or more effective than chemo) every doctor would be more than happy to use them.

A few years ago the government started doing acupuncture studies in which one group was given actual acupuncture and the other group were just poked with the blunt end of the needle. Neither group could see what was happening. The one I read about was done on severe arthritis and it was something like 90% effective. Of course, there haven't been enough studies for it to be considered scientifically reliable.

As I said before, Germany has been doing placebo controlled double blind studies on herbs for a long time. Their medicine is much more integrative.

I find it really funny that you think doctors would jump to do something unfamiliar to them just because it's been proven effective. Once the pharmaceutical companies start marketing the herbs, sending the docs on herb seminars and such, and handing out free herbs it might happen.