Whenever I listen to Skeptics With A K and hear @mikehall314 talking about the placebo, all I can think of is that acupuncture is the perfect example of a placebo intervention
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It's impossible to blind acupuncture trials effectively, so there's always going to be some bias there Nevertheless, what you see is big variability in the less well-done trials that disappears the better the trials are
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And then most systematic reviews find minimal or no evidence of benefit (or evidence of a statistically significant but clinically unimportant benefit) Except for pain
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Now maybe that's because acupuncture does work really well for pain - it's certainly possible
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But pain is the one thing that we can't measure in any objective way - it is by its very nature subjective So it's really hard to tell, given that acupuncture trials can never be blinded, whether the pain finding is actually because of acupuncture or something else
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