Word: shams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Absolutely. The bigger worry was that I would find out that God was a ruse. And that all of this that I felt that day and the subsequent decade was a sham, that it was just brain chemistry, an electrical storm in my temporal lobe, a delusion. My faith is the prism through which I look at the world and make moral decisions. What do you do if you find out it's wrong...
...What did you find? Is religion all a sham...
Cherkin and his team followed up with the patients at eight weeks, 26 weeks and a year after their sessions to find out how much pain they were experiencing. After eight weeks, twice the number of patients getting any type of acupuncture - whether it was customized, standard or sham - reported improvements in their ability to function, such as walking or going up and down steps without pain, compared with those sticking with traditional care. That improvement was expected, to a certain extent, since physicians are increasingly aware that acupuncture does have physiological effects on the body. "There...
More surprising was the fact that all three acupuncture services, including the sham version with toothpicks, had about the same effect on pain reduction. It's worth remembering that the toothpicks were used at the same points involved in the standard acupuncture treatment - that is, practitioners were not pricking their patients at random. A year after the treatments, all of the acupuncture patients reported an average 63% improvement in pain relief, while half of the untreated patients reported feeling better. "Everyone agrees that acupuncture is having some physiological effect. But we still don't understand how it might be working...
Cherkin's findings raise at least two possible explanations. Since the sham procedure used the same acupuncture points as the legitimate therapy, there may be something about the stimulation of those points, even without skin penetration, that triggers a beneficial physiological reaction in the body and the nervous system, leading to pain relief. (This may be the mechanism behind acupressure, which involves pressing certain points on the body to alter physiological processes occurring deep inside organs.) Or the patients' improvement may be due simply to a powerful placebo effect, in which the mere belief that you are receiving...