The condition is quite difficult to treat. Some AIDS patients seek relief in acupuncture, but nobody knows whether it works. Although acupuncture is inexplicable to Western science, it's been proven to kill pain in surgery and ease the side effects of chemotherapy. Acupuncture diagnoses have no counterpart in Western medicine, and patients with a single Western diagnosis may be diagnosed and treated in many ways. Acupuncture is also hard for Western medicine to evaluate.
Patients know when they're being stuck with needles, raising the likelihood of a placebo effect.
A nettlesome problem When Judith Shlay and colleagues at the Denver Community Programs for Clinical Research on AIDS wanted to study acupuncture for AIDS patients, they tried to sidestep some of these hazards. And they standardized the treatment, to pin down exactly what they were testing. But standardizing the treatment raised a major question. David Hassert, an acupuncturist in Middleton, Wis., insists that the treatment must be tailored to the individual. Western doctors like to have one thing to fix one thing.