Dozens killed by incorrectly placed acupuncture needles

This is a funny story if you think about it. It actually works out to 2 people per year out of everyone on earth who has had acupuncture! That's pretty good odds I'd say. If is not a single pharmaceutical medicine on the planet that can claim the same as that not by a very, very long way. This is such a non-story it's laughable, simple scaremongering for no reason I can see other than to get a scary looking headline. Also if you take into accord that some were from failed sterilisation of equipment & for years now all practitioners use disposable 'use once' needles, then you can see the chances of a death in any western country is virtually zero.
But I thought it interesting that there actually so few over such a consistently long time!

Quote :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/18/dozens-killed-acupuncture-needles

Dozens killed by incorrectly placed acupuncture needles

Professor of complementary medicine calls for adequate training for all acupuncture practitioners after survey reveals punctured hearts and lungs among causes of death over past 45 years

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Monday 18 October 2010 17.21 BST



Punctured organs and infection as a result of failure to sterilise needles were among the causes of death after acupuncture. Photograph: Getty

Eighty-six people have been accidentally killed by badly trained acupuncturists over the past 45 years, according to Britain's leading expert on alternative medicine.

A review of patients who died soon after acupuncture found a history of punctured hearts and lungs, damaged arteries and livers, nerve problems, shock, infection and haemorrhage, largely caused by practitioners placing their needles incorrectly or failing to sterilise their equipment.

Many of the 86 patients, aged between 26 and 82 years old, died after being treated by acupuncturists in China or Japan, but a handful of fatalities were recorded in the US, Germany and Australia. The most recent death, of a 26-year-old woman in China, occurred last year.

The most common cause of death was a condition called pneumothorax, where air finds its way between the membranes that separate the lungs from the chest wall and causes the lungs to collapse.

In most of the cases, doctors were certain that acupuncture was to blame, but in some the cause was less clear.

Describing his research in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said: "These fatalities are avoidable and a reminder of the need to insist on adequate training for all acupuncturists."

The number of deaths was likely to be "the tip of a larger iceberg", he added.

My partner is a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner and he said the main problem in Australia is doctors doing weekend courses on "dry needling" - basically acupuncture without the theory as opposed to people like himself who have trained for 4 years and had about 500hours of supervised clinical practice. He said 95% of cases of pneumothorax are caused by people not trained in TCM.

Meanwhile most pharmaceutical anti-depressants don't work any better than placebo.