Acupuncture

Excerpt

To the editor: The essential experimental design in human pain research to evaluate an analgesic method is to (a) select subjects with an objective reason for pain, such as postoperative incisional pain, and then (b) either give a putative pain treatment or a placebo. The recent paper by Drs. Moore and Berk (1) is a serious attempt to do this for acupuncture, but flaws in its design render its conclusions indeterminate.

The patients were selected only on the basis of their subjective complaint of shoulder discomfort. In order to minimize psychosomatic reactions to pain and treatment in the subjects, some