What is actually happening during acupuncture, does it actually work ?
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You’ll see a lot of studies use a sugar pill group as control, instead of just a group which doesn’t take any medication. That’s fine in an effort to control for placebo effect. It’s based on the observation that if you had your trial group, a placebo control group and a “regular” control group, often times if the drug does nothing, the first two will score the same, but still outperform the last.
With that in mind, acupuncture does work. It just works on the scale of placebo. Scientifically, there isn’t really a meaningful distinction between things which work as well as placebo in all cases, but via a different mechanic than placebo. So, hypothetically, it might work the way acupuncturists claim, and just happen to always be exactly as effective as placebo. Or it might just be a placebo effect.
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