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Modern research into alternative medicine is difficult as it has to follow the double blind procedure used in testing new pharmaceutical drugs. This is one of the major challenges in acupuncture research is in the design of an appropriateness of the “placebo” or “control group”. In trials of new drugs double blind testing is the accepted standard.

What is meant by this – a number of people are put into two groups, one group gets the new pharmaceutical drug and the other group gets a pretend drug, both groups are unaware. The individual has no idea whether she or she is taking a drug or a sugar pill.

In conventional medicine it is well known that people in both groups can show signs and symptoms – drug or no drug, this is called the placebo effect.

However, acupuncture is a procedure rather than a pill, it is difficult to design studies in which both the acupuncturist and patient are blind as to the treatment being given. The same problem arises in double blind procedures used in biomedicine, including virtually all surgical procedures, dentistry, physical therapy, etc. As the Institute of medicine states –

Controlled trials of surgical procedures have been done less frequently than studies of medications because it is much more difficult to standardize the process of surgery. Surgery depends to some degree on the skills and training of the surgeon and the specific environment and support team available to the surgeon. A surgical procedure in the hands of a highly skilled, experienced surgeon is different from the same procedure in the hands of an inexperienced and unskilled surgeon… For many modalities, it is similarly difficult to separate the effectiveness of the treatment from the effectiveness of the person providing the treatment.

This is also the case for using this model for testing acupuncture. Yet acupuncture has stood the test of time. Today millions of people are using acupuncture.