Conclusion

Randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials of acupuncture are recommended for the evaluation of its efficacy with the goal of separating the specific effects from the non-specific ones. However, it is difficult to define acupuncture control [ 102 ]. Experimental and clinical studies have shown that minimal acupuncture, used as placebo control, is not necessarily inert from a physiological perspective. The relevance of using minimal acupuncture as placebo acupuncture must therefore be questioned [ 103. 104 ]. Instead of reducing bias, this trial design may introduce a bias against the treatment being tested [ 5 ]. Therefore, the results obtained from this method should be interpreted with care, particularly under the conditions that minimal acupuncture may have both specific and non-specific effects [ 105 ].