It’s not a correlation, it’s a controlled study, big difference.

You’re missing the point a controlled study. As with every treatment ever conceived, it has to be measured against a placebo for efficacy.

If I give one group a sugar pill, and a second group a new pain killer, and both report similar improvement, we can conclude that the pain killer doesn’t work.

How does it show a lack of worth for MD treatment? MD treatment wasn’t a variable.

Correlation is part of what a controlled study does. It shows one thing and puts it up against what happened in another situation. That is correlation. This is an inductive reasoning method. In this case, it does not prove a causal link because some other principles entirely could be at work beyond the scope of the study.

As for MD treatment you wrote:
“Group 1 received only M.D. care
2 received M.D. care and true acupuncture
3 received M.D. care and fake acupuncture (random toothpick pokes)”

Both other situations worked better than the control itself. Just because it isn’t a variable doesn’t mean it logically is not responsible to its involvement.

As for the pain pill, this is not necessarily true, but we consider in our limited knowledge scope and for the sake of a face-paced money making culture of medicine: It is possible that the pain killer does not work, and it seems that there is a probability that it holds no significant value.

Scientific method is an outlet of logic and must obey logic, unless it only considers a scientific methodology in its study (which is a very narrow scope) and speaks only in those terms. In those terms “law” is a “the way we guess that all things are because we see it sometimes is…” and principle is “most likely what happens is.”

Science is great…. but its methodology isn’t everything. Science must yield to reason.

Of course, and don’t think that I believe that acupuncture can’t POSSIBLY work.

When I say I don’t believe in acupuncture, what I’m really saying is “It has not yet been shown to have anymore effect than a similarly administered placebo”

If a reliable study is published to the contrary, or the mechanism for how it could work are identified, I’ll change my mind on the issue.

cont.
And I’d love for such a study to be released, acupuncture is a minimally invasive procedure which claims to be able to cure/treat a wide range of afflictions which cause people to suffer.

I would love acupuncture to work.

But no one can say HOW acupuncture works, nor IF it works with any certainty, in fact, when measured, it always looks like it doesn’t. Therefore, I don’t think it does.

For it to be a placebo you must beleive contrary evidence- which the above study did not provide. The neutral stance, which may be better descriptive of yourself, is a true skeptic (one refusing to pass judgment).

As for the How: How do quatum bits work? You can’t measure those either.

doesnt it hurt?

If it is done right, it shouldn’t hurt at all.