When Patients' Assessments of Treatment for Subjective Symptoms are At Odds with Authoritative Assessments in the Biomedical Literature: The Case of Patients Treated with Acupuncture for Low Back Pain in a Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic in China (and Story of a Bewildered Chicken)

Abstract

Assessments of treatments for 'subjective symptoms' are problematic and potentially contentious. These are symptoms without ascertainable pathophysiology, also referred to as 'medically unexplained.' Treatments of them may be assessed from different perspectives, and an assessment as seen from one perspective may be discrepant with an assessment as seen from another perspective. The observational study described in the paper represents one perspective. Patients in the study were treated with acupuncture for the subjective symptom of low back pain in a Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic in China; acupuncture is a form of TCM, which is indigenous to China. Shortly after treatment began and six months afterward, patients reported 'clinically important improvements' on a variety of standard, cross-culturally validated outcome measures, including pain intensity, physical functioning, and emotional functioning; this assessment is consistent with numerous assessments of acupuncture in China and other Southeastern Asian countries. On the other hand, clinical trials represent another perspective from which to assess acupuncture. Although assessments based on trials are not uniform, several assessments based on them, including those published in journals such as Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, conclude that acupuncture is not effective. These trials, however, were mainly situated in the U.S., western European countries, and other WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries. This is notable, because the population of China, the indigenous context of acupuncture, is greater than populations of WEIRD countries combined. Patients' expectations of a treatment such as acupuncture and their prior familiarity with it vary among contexts, and patients' experiences of treatment outcomes may vary accordingly. In short, although clinical trials constitute a test of truth in biomedicine and inform authoritative assessments in WEIRD countries, they do not necessarily represent the truth from the perspective of those experiencing outcomes of especially indigenous treatments for subjective symptoms in non-WEIRD contexts.

Keywords: Acupuncture Treatment; China; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Low Back Pain; Medically Unexplained Symptoms; Patient-Relevant Outcome; Social Context.