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.
In natural medicine, no treatment is done like that. You always treat the person, not the symptom, and using one standard treatment is treating the symptom, not the person. Although Shlay says the test only proves that stimulating certain acupuncture points did not treat AIDS neuropathy, she adds that another lesson was learned. You can study alternative practice of medicine using rigorous controlled trials, but you won't make everybody happy in the process.