What you must know before you try dry needling

EDITED 05/13/2015: A previous version of this article included a section titled “A few key facts about dry needling”. This section has been removed and I now encourage interested readers to consult a detailed and authoritative discussion of the same issues by the National Center for Acupuncture Safety and Integrity (NCASI) here. To this point I have not spoken out about this issue because I didn’t want to get embroiled in an ugly fight, but it has come to the point that I cannot in good conscience remain quiet about... [Read more...]

Not getting better? Eastern medicine may help

Below is a great little video with Dr. Sanjay Gupta talking about the new Chinese herbal clinic at the Cleveland Clinic. A patient with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia) is featured. The herbal clinic at the Cleveland Clinic is an exciting development because, although acupuncture is increasingly accepted and utilized at progressive medical centers around the country, Chinese herbal medicine has not been embraced to nearly the same extent. This is too bad because, in China, herbal medicine is considered the preferred modality for... [Read more...]

Acupuncture and the placebo response

A recent study comparing real acupuncture, laser acupuncture, and sham laser acupuncture with no treatment for knee arthritis showed that real acupuncture, laser acupuncture, and sham laser acupuncture all resulted in decrease in pain. In the media this study has been presented as evidence that acupuncture does not work and that any decrease in pain associated with acupuncture is the result of the placebo effect. In reality the story is more complicated than that. First of all, the study was small, with fewer than 20 patients in each treatment... [Read more...]