No point to acupuncture on animals

I was unfortunate enough to read this uncritical article on acupuncture for animals. Along with the usual drivel about improving the flow of qi, it’s been around for thousands of years, it’s been “shown” (how?) to do numerous good things etc etc, we get this misleading old canard:

At least with dogs and cats we know the effects are real and not a result of the mental expectation of improvement.

What they’re getting at is that since animals don’t know what’s going on, any benefit can’t be due to the placebo effect, and so double-blind studies are not necessary to test the efficacy of therapies on animals. They’re actually using this as an argument that altie procedures such as acupuncture have real benefits above placebo, but how do they know there is a benefit? Who determines whether the animal is sick and who determines whether the animal got better? After all, the animal can’t tell you if he feels better or not. The answer is the person supplying the altie remedy is often also the person who decides if the animal improved or not. And that is where the double-blinding is needed – the veterinarian diagnosing the illness, and determining if the treatment worked or not, must be blind to whether real or placebo treatments are given.

People think altie remedies work for a number of reasons, and only one of these is placebo.

They include:

1. Placebo
2. Temporary mood improvements due to the personal nature of the treatment
3. Psychological investment of the patient in the success of the therapy
4. Misdirection
5. Incorrect diagnosis to start with
6. The cyclical nature of the illness (gets worse/gets better/gets worse/gets better…)
7. Other medicines the patient is taking
8. The illness just goes away by itself.

All of the above can apply to humans, and 1 to 4 may provide actual benefits to some people. Animals won’t benefit from items 1 to 3, although items 5 through 8 may make it appear the altie therapy is working. (4 – Misdirection – might provide some minor temporary benefits in pain relief, but not much else.) It is important to remember that there is no benefit to the animal, and this is why the author of this article has it completely backward: altie therapies such as acupuncture, that are mainly placebo, should never be used on animals because animals don’t benefit from the placebo effect. In addition, unlike adult humans, animals don’t get to choose their therapies and so they need protection from bad decisions made by their woo owners.

The randomized double-blind study was designed to control for all the biases listed above. We know that the “great bulk of the randomised controlled trials [of acupuncture] to date do not provide convincing evidence of pain relief over placebo”. We also know it doesn’t matter where you put the needles: all that matters is the person receiving the acupuncture believes the needles are being placed in the special magic places. Even stronger statements could be made against, for example, homeopathy – another useless therapy that is also practiced on animals. Treating sick animals with useless therapies, instead of available evidence based therapies, is nothing but animal cruelty and should never be allowed.

On a lighter note, there was another hard to believe claim in the article:

Believe it or not, during the acupuncture treatment itself, most animals exhibit little or no pain or discomfort. In fact, most of our patients will lie down during a treatment with their owners holding them and take a nap. The treatment itself may last 10 seconds to 30 minutes, with the average treatment being 20 minutes.

For a dog maybe, but a cat would never put up with that kind of nonsense. My cat puts up a fight if I just check to see if her claws need clipping. I can’t imagine she’d sit calmly and let someone stick needles in her for even 10 seconds let alone 30 minutes. And she hasn’t even read the studies. Reference: How to give a pill to a cat and a dog.

Comments

[EoR]

When woo is applied to horses there are standard, recognisable signs that it is working. These include lowering the head, dozing off, yawning, passing wind etc. Strangely, any horse standing around for any length of time will do exactly the same things...

[Lord Runolfr]

Some cats would endure the treatment. We've got an outside cat who's a total slut. I mean it, she rolls over on her back and writhes at your approach, begging to be rubbed on the belly. It's very undignified.

[Eric]

Heh, try sticking needles in her, Runolfr.

[Bronze Dog]

My brother's cat could probably take the tummy rubs and needles. We suspect he's a small black dog in disguise, since he likes tummy rubs, even when you put your back into them, like you would with a dog.

[Helena Constantine]

I recall at the time China Westernized its economic policie, PBS did a documentary series explaining hwo Chinese culture differed from Western.

One of the segments showed how at Chinese medical schools physicians were trianind in bothe Western and Traditional medicine.

I distinctly recall that they shwoed major surgery (I beleive it was an appendectomy--certainly the abdominal cavity was opned up) using nothing for anaethesia except accupuncture. It was wasn't an experiment. They claimed it was a standard paractice at the hospital and so easily repeatable. They admitted that there was no way to explain how it worked on the Western model.

At the time (I was in High School) I thought that PBS would not broadcast outright fraud, and that if what was shown was possible, then surely the phaenomenon would quickly be investigated and understood.

I am now inlcined to suspect that the physicisans ahd perpetrated conscius fraud against the film makers.

The impression I get from my recent persual of the Skeptic's circle sugggests that experimentatin with accupuncture ahs shown that it is compeletely ineffective.

Does any else recall that program, of can suggest a site with a more general treatment of the subject.

[Skeptico]

Helena: you could read this report by Gary P. Posner. In summary, it seems unlikely that acupuncture was used alone: either other anesthetics are also used, or the entire procedure is a sham.

[David Harmon]

Generally good, but I can't resist making a little trouble:

1) One of the theories for how acupuncture might provide anaesthesia, is that the stimulation from the needles distracts from or undercuts the pain signal. Seems to me that could well work for dogs....

2) Just how sure are you that the placebo effect *wouldn't* be available to dogs? Communicating the expectations involved would be the big issue, but dogs do pick up more than most people think -- and they can be *very* psychologically dependent on, and trusting of, their masters!

[The Rev. Schmitt.]

I have to agree with David Harmon - I don't think that we can rule out a placebo effect for some pets. We know thanks to Pavlov's dogs, Clever Hans and many subsequent studies that animals can pick up even very subtle behavioural cues from people and this provides a mechanism by which the placebo effect can take place. Unfortunately 'In less cognitively flexible animals, where conditioning is more important than expectancy, the literature on placebo responses is relatively sparse.' (Can't get at the reference from this computer myself, but should prove an interesting read.)

And I'm not so sure the hope of a placebo effect is a worthy reason to take any course of treatment, or force one on poor unconsenting animals. Surely a confidence in legitimate medicine will provide the same effect on top of the results of the actual treatment?

-The Rev. Schmitt.

[P George Stewart]

Actually there's some interesting research coming up which shows there may be more to acupuncture than placebo - not for some of the wilder medical claims, to be sure, but for the limited anaesthetic use that does seem to crop up in many studies.

The body's connective tissue, the fascia, turns out to have some curious properties, hitherto overlooked, which could account for it.

http://www.medical-acupuncture.co.uk/journal/2004-1/002.shtml

http://www.icmart.org/icmart99/ab11.htm

There's also a link between this and the Chinese martial arts that have been called "internal". The unusual relaxed power shown by genuine practitioners of these arts (and I have to enter the caveat that they are rare even in China, and aren't likely to be found at your local mall in the States) look like they're the result not of "qi", but of clever leverage and alignment, but the training of that leverage seems to be helped by using the body in a connected way that's "helped" by the already-connected nature of the body's "myofascial web" (as it has been called), and some of the feelings one gets while doing this kind of training might account for the feeling of the flow of a mysterious force called "qi" along "lines" that people widely report. (There are some quite rational people who are into martial arts who are investigating this stuff on a private mailing list I was a member of for a while - looking at it all from a point of view of mechanics, biology, etc.)

One quick experiment you can do to get something of a "qi" feeling: hold your hands in front of you and slightly apart as if you're feeling an "energy" between them, "play" with it gently, eventually you'll have a feeeling which subjectively, for all the world, feels like a kind of weird magnetic energy. Of course it's unlikely to be any such thing, but the cause of the feeling may lie in this fascia business.