2011/08/01 by Dirk Devroey, Erwin Van De Vijver
Medicine · Neuroscience · #Acupuncture Treatment Research Studies #Pain Management and Placebo Effect #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
paper · pdf · doi:10.3399/bjgp11x588295
openalex publication_date 2011/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
The lively presentational style of the revamped Journal is welcome, and the new concise and accessible approach to research will certainly help time-pressed clinicians. However, there is an uncomfortable tension between the need to present data to busy practitioners in an easily digestible format and grossoversimplification that risks the misinterpretation of data. The Editor seems to have fallen into this trap with Paterson et al's study on acupuncture with medically unexplained symptoms. 1 The study is riddled with bias in a number of key areas including participant selection and the unblinded intervention. The construction of the study lends itself to a positive result and there is little value in conducting acupuncture studies without adjusting for this bias by using some kind of sham treatment. The authors do discuss the 'black-box' effect of the intervention and this does raise the unfortunate, but in this case appropriate, image of a terrible crash that needs careful post-disaster investigation. Even given the obvious bias, the effect was small and the graphs presented in the full-length article, 1 sadly missing in the print version, made this abundantly clear.