Eli5: how are treatments like acupuncture, kinetic tape and homeopathy still a thing, if scientific studies disproving their effectiveness are publicly available to everyone and doctors?

Question

Eli5: how are treatments like acupuncture, kinetic tape and homeopathy still a thing, if scientific studies disproving their effectiveness are publicly available to everyone and doctors?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Different things have differing amounts of bunkum to them. Homeopathy is complete and utter bullshit. Acupuncture has enough positive effect on enough people that there may be more than placebo effect to it, but we don’t have the data to know for sure and Western medicine doesn’t account for the concepts behind it. There are things that work even though they shouldn’t by our measurements.

KT Tape is a weird one. It’s useful in giving a little extra support to joints and muscles for some movements, especially when working through a degree of injury. A lot of people consider it a miraculous device, and as someone who’s used it I think that’s a load of crap. But I have a shoulder that I damaged my rotator cuff in decades ago, before arthroscopic repair was a thing. Sometimes when I’m doing overhead lifting I’ll put KT tape on – and it helps a little. Not huge at all, and it’s not like I lift PRs with it, but if I tape up properly there’s some extra support, the lift hurts less, and I’m not as sore after. Totally anecdotal, of course, but at least for me in some cases it’s useful.

And that’s the case with a lot of things that don’t tie in to the classic system. Science has made amazing strides in curing and preventing disease, Vaccines have done more to keep humans alive than anything else short of maybe the invention of the sewer system, and surgeons can work miracles to repair conditions that were once life-threatening (just for myself, I’ve had Lasik on my eyes back in the late ’90s and I had both my knees replaced in 2022). There are things that help people but we don’t understand the mechanisms well enough yet (I’d put things like cannabis and acupuncture in that list), and things that are entirely psychosomatic like homeopathy. If you start with a concept like “water has memory” you’re in the weeds already.