An eloquent and tenacious colleague has asked me to write about a cause she has taken up. It is certainly a just cause. She is mostly right I think. I have avoided these fights into which she dives headfirst. But if by being a bystander I silently condone the misdeed, then I have no […]
Too NICE – there appears to be a glaring orthodox bias in NG59
When the draft clinical guideline for low back pain & sciatica was published in February 2016, it was with some resignation that I noted the 2009 recommendation in CG88 for acupuncture in low back pain (from 6 weeks to 1 year)[1] had been dropped. It was expected for a variety of off-radar reasons, from pre-guideline […]
Quality sham – there appears to be a significantly greater improvement in health related quality of life (HRQoL) with sham acupuncture than with conventional care
Comments stimulated by: Saramago et al. BMC Med Res Methodol 2016 This week a new finding in the acupuncture field was published in rather unlikely journal. BMC Medical Research Methodology is one of the Biomed Central range of open access online journals, and the paper principally describes a new method within network meta-analysis for analyzing data […]
Trust Me, I’m an acupuncture expert – but I have never actually had it or used it…
On Thursday 1st September the first episode of series five of Trust Me I’m A Doctor aired on BBC2. I was keen to see how acupuncture was treated after spending a day engaged in trying to demonstrate a change in pressure pain threshold in the lead presenter about a month previously. The experiment went […]
Breathless…
…a career-defining symptom? The Filshie files – breathlessness Jacky Filshie (JF) has devoted a medical career to symptom management in the cancer suffering population. Her early personal experience of acupuncture needling had a significant impression on her, probably because she happened to have the right genetic complement to maximise the central effects of the […]
Musings on heterogeneity in quantitative outcomes of acupuncture trials in LBP
Further commentary: Low back pain and sciatica: management of non-specific low back pain and sciatica Draft clinical guideline February 2016 This commentary follows a previous blog post. Late last Friday night I got around to dropping the pain VAS outcome figures from the trials of acupuncture versus sham into RevMan 5 – the software used for […]
Exercise not acupuncture recommended by NICE for low back pain – balanced assessment, bias or error?
Commentary: Low back pain and sciatica: management of non-specific low back pain and sciatica Draft clinical guideline February 2016 NICE clinical guidelines are very large pieces of work. This draft runs to over 1000 pages with the addition of around 2500 pages of appendices, and data extracted and analysed from nearly 600 RCTs. Having sat on […]
Acupuncture & menopausal hot flushes
Comments on: Ee et al Ann Int Med 2016 A large rigorous trial published in a prestigious general medical journal, and the usual mantra rings out – acupuncture is no better than sham. In this case there was not a fraction of difference from a non-penetrating sham in a two-armed trial with over 300 women. […]