Acupuncture for 'frequent attenders' with medically unexplained symptoms.

摘要

I was dismayed to see the headline on the front of the BJGP claiming that 'Acupuncture: effective in a randomised trial for patients with unexplained symptoms'. Alas, this is the kind of handling I would expect from the tabloid press.The study did not take account of recent systematic reviews that sham acupuncture is as good as 'real' acupuncture, and that the effect in any case was 'to lack clinical relevance and cannot be clearly distinguished from bias'. To know this, and not to account for it, is a major design flaw and one that infers that this research paper wasted resources.