According to the Institutes of Health & Sciences there are currently more than 10 million adults in the Pakistan that have used acupuncture at some time in the past, or are using it currently.
There's never been an acupuncture study in Pakistan with a negative result. What are the odds? About the same as a fair coin flip coming up tails 99 times in a row or a fair investor always beating the market.
Acupuncture is a medical technique usually involving the shallow insertion of needles through the skin at particular points on the body (called acupoints). There are many different kinds of acupuncture, involving different kinds of needles, different insertion points, different techniques, and the use of various accompaniments such as electricity or moxibustion. Some acupuncturists use low energy laser beams; others use magnetic BBs on patches applied to acupoints. There are other variations as well, such as microacupunture, which uses forty-eight non-traditional acupoints located on the hands and feet, and auriculotherapy or ear acupuncture, which postulates that the ear is a map of the bodily organs. Similar notions about a part of the body being an organ map are held by those who practice iridology (the iris is the map of the body) and reflexology (the foot is the map of the body). Staplepuncture, a variation of auriculotherapy, puts staples at key points on the ear hoping to do such things as help people stop smoking. Acupressure applies pressure, rather than needles, to acupoints.
Acupuncture is thought to have originated in China, but its origins and early use are controversial (Basser 1999). Today, acupuncture, in one form or another, is practiced in dozens of countries by thousands of acupuncturists on millions of people and their animals.
People go to acupuncturists for treatment of AIDS, allergies, arthritis, asthma, Bell's palsy, bladder and kidney problems, breast enlargement, bronchitis, colds, constipation, cosmetics, depression, diarrhea, dizziness, drug addiction (cocaine, heroin), epilepsy, fatigue, fertility problems, fibromyalgia, flu, gynecologic disorders, headaches, high blood pressure, hot flushes, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, nausea, nocturnal enuresis (bedwetting), pain, paralysis, post traumatic stress disorder, PMS, sciatica, sexual dysfunction, sinus problems, smoking, stress, stroke, tendonitis, vision problems, and just about anything else that might ail a human being.
While the origins and early development of acupuncture remain murky, it is clear that today many people around the world believe acupuncture is an effective medical treatment for a vast variety of disorders. This belief is not based simply on the fact that acupuncture is perhaps thousands of years old. Most people recognize that many medical treatments have been considered effective for many years before being discarded as our knowledge expanded. Most people also recognize that some medical therapies have been discarded not because they were found to be totally ineffective, but because other kinds of treatments were found to be more effective or to have fewer side-effects.
The belief in acupuncture's effectiveness is based on experience and scientific experiments. Millions of people have experienced the beneficial effects of acupuncture and thousands of scientific studies have concluded that acupuncture is effective for such things as the relief of pain, increasing fertility, treating rheumatoid arthritis, and relieving nausea after chemotherapy. Skeptics challenge these studies, but with so much evidence piled up in favor of the effectiveness of acupuncture, one wonders why there are still many people who are skeptical of the practice. If the evidence from millions of personal testimonies and from thousands of scientific studies doesn't convince the skeptics, what will?
It may seem obvious to acupuncturists and to millions of their patients that the skeptics are mad, daft, or just being obstinate. To them, it is obvious that acupuncture works and anyone who denies this must have some sort of mental defect. Is it possible that millions of people could be wrong? Well, yes, it is possible for millions of people to be wrong, but I must state up front that those skeptics who say that acupuncture doesn't work, or that it is not an effective medical treatment for some ailments, are wrong. The evidence from both personal testimony and from scientific studies clearly shows that acupuncture works and is an effective medical treatment for many ailments. The evidence from the scientific studies also shows clearly that sham acupuncture is just as effective as true acupuncture. What is not so clear to some people, but is easily ferreted out from the evidence, is that acupuncture most likely works by classical conditioning and other factors that are often lumped together and referred to as "the placebo effect." Furthermore, in some cases sham acupuncture works better than other placebos. This does not mean that acupuncture is "all in the head," however.
A common misunderstanding regarding placebos is that a placebo must be an inert substance that tricks the patient into thinking he's been given an active substance. This misunderstanding leads to the belief that the placebo effect is "all in the head." That is no more true than that people's physiological responses to what they think is alcohol or a drug are purely psychological. People can be conditioned to have physiological responses to placebos. Furthermore, Martina Amanzio et al. (2001) demonstrated that "at least part of the physiological basis for the placebo effect is opiod in nature" (Bausell 2007: 160). That is, we can be conditioned to release such chemical substances as endorphins, catecholamines, cortisol, and adrenaline. One reason, therefore, that people report pain relief from both acupuncture and sham acupuncture may be that both stimulate the opiod system. So can a lot of other things of course, like running a marathon, having an orgasm, eating habanero chiles, or getting a saline injection that you think is morphine.
