Acupuncture - Notable Critics

Notable Critics

In 1997, the American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs stated:

Critics contend that acupuncturists, including many traditionally trained physicians, merely stick needles in patients as a way to offer another form of treatment for which they can be reimbursed, since many insurance companies will do so. Critical reviews of acupuncture summarized by Hafner and others conclude that no evidence exists that acupuncture affects the course of any disease...Much of the information currently known about these therapies makes it clear that many have not been shown to be efficacious. Well-designed, stringently controlled research should be done to evaluate the efficacy of alternative therapies. —

The National Council Against Health Fraud stated in 1990 that acupuncture’s "theory and practice are based on primitive and fanciful concepts of health and disease that bear no relationship to present scientific knowledge."

In 1993 neurologist Arthur Taub called acupuncture "nonsense with needles."

The website Quackwatch criticizes TCM as having unproven efficacy and an unsound scientific basis.

Acupuncture has also been characterized as pseudoscience or pseudomedical by: Physicist John P. Jackson; Steven Salzberg, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and professor at the University of Maryland; Steven Novella, Yale University professor of neurology, and founder and executive editor of the blog Science Based Medicine; Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor-in-chief at the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.