(SV*)null
interpreting the void as SamV
A lot of emphasis is placed on Ernst’s extensive training in many alternative medicines, and of the University of Exeter’s department of Alternative Medical Science.
However, which institutes did he train this huge number of “alternative” therapies in? In particular, Acupuncture is a practice that takes four to five years to become junior in. Which institute did he go to? Did he visit the source - China - as many people of his era were doing? Was he with the Norweigan scientists who in the 1960’s documented acupuncture anasthaesia being used to perform open heart surgery in hospitals in Shanghai? Is he saying that this was mere “placebo”?
And then, the University of Exeter. Have they, like Cambridge, a long history of authors who have performed lifetimes of research into the multitude of Sciences of China?
Impressive sounding credentials and a few studies. Case closed, right?
Scientists frequently overstate the implications of their research. For instance, a recent result investigating channels - one of the handful of key theories from the 2,000+-year old works that Needham, Morant and many others of the time were studying - on-line at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11863401.
What researchers originally showed was that if they injected radioactive tracers into the body, that the lines of these 2,000-year-old Chinese Channels could be seen.
This new result challenged this - they injected at a “control point” and saw the same patterns. The problem with this is: there is no control point - any first-year acupuncture student will tell you that the channels cover every inch of the body.
The research is good and the result useful and supportive of Chinese Medicine, but showing the control to be flawed means you can ignore the scientists’ interpretation of the data, and read only the results.
While Ernst mocks this truth, the sad fact is that studies which do not show effects can only chip away slowly at disproving something. When real-world observations support a theory, you have to keep investigating it until you can explain them.
The Chinese have over 2,000 years of evidence for Acupuncture. The question is not can Science confirm it to be true, but: Can science explain it?