It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount".
It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day.
Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines.
In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life.
Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works.
The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning."
Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds.
An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow.
And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
