Apparently I've been napping again and missed something: Why would anyone use Effexor for hot flashes, etc. from breast cancer or any other cause??? What's the connection with it being an antidepressant? I can't imagine why this use would even occur to anyone, let alone enough someones to actually warrant a study.

This is looking less like science and more like a search for a needle in a haystack every day.

I am sure that acupuncture can help depression because, if placebo can help depression, then, anything given with the patient knowing it will help them, is likely to work.

Here is a story of a woman who was cured of a thirty [30] year depression with placebo.
http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=2055

Not only was she surprised but the clinical researcher was astounded.

"Hm, I wonder why acupuncture isn't being more routinely used as a treatment for depression."

1) Psychiatrists and primary care doctors, who are the main treatment providers for depression, don't practice acupuncture.

2) Private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid (probably) don't cover alternative treatments.

3) Who has money left to pay out of pocket after filling the gas tank and refrigerator each week?

Those are my guesses.

A few years ago I had acupuncture done for my knees, which were a wreck. The result? My knees are still a wreck. Maybe it would work better for the mind, since it seems to me that this is where acupuncture draws its strength from.

It is odd that Effexor is used to treat hot flashes when Effexor CAUSES side effects like hot flashes. I sweat like a pig when I took that drug.

"as good as Effexor." Since I don't think Effexor is ever good I'm not sure I buy into what we're comparing here but I'm not surprised that just about anything turns out to be at least as good, if not better, than that drug.

I think we should all wait until the study is actually published so it can be examined more thoroughly. It article cited didn't mention whether the randomization was properly done, whether it was double-blind, how the symptoms were measured, what the dose of the Effexor was, and so on. So, too many variables before making a final decision.

Regarding acupuncture in depression, the Cochrane Collaboration did a review in April 2005 finding that acupuncture had no evidence in support of its efficacy, mainly because the studies were of poor quality.

The 2008 study that you cited found 8 small RCT's that compared active acupuncture to sham acupuncture (as placebo). It showed that there was a significant difference -- but just barely -- between the two treatments for depression in terms of a vague category of "improvement", but had no difference in terms of more specific rates of response or remission. Hardly a conclusive study supporting acupuncture for depression.

I wonder if this is a prelude to Pristique the Daughter of Effexor, yet another packaging of a drug like Risperdal and Invega. I highly doubt hot flashes will be helped by an antidepressant, at least my experience has been extreme sweating while on Trazodone or Prozac, and once off of those drugs stopped wondering if I was having hot flashes!

I think any form of holistic care can help a person if focused enough. I'd rather take a non-drug approach.

4 what it is worth, my nephew's mother did acupuncture after one of her children was still born. She went into a very bad post partum depression (who would blame her?), and her ob-gyn recommended acupuncture. It cured her depression, and as an added caveat, she got pregnant with my nephew a few months later. She did not want to take Prozac, which was perscribed to her.

i was advised to try it next month for my cramps. I suffer from such bad ones I usually am prostrate on the bathroom floor unable to move for hours at a time.

My vet also does acupuncture for dogs and cats. He is one of a select few in NJ licensed to do that as well. Supposedly it's good for doggie and kitty arthritis.

I can certainly understand why many people prefer alternative approaches to medical care. Allopathic medicine has many faults, but especially the lack of time physicians spend with their patients due to monetary constraints plays a huge role. Many people feel better after seeing a acupuncturist or homeopathic doctor mainly because of the extra time spent with the patient to build the therapeutic alliance. However, acupuncture has only been shown to better than placebo in some kinds of pain and nausea, and not for anything else, and homeopathy is entirely placebo.

People prefer stories to statistics. If you've heard statistics that a particular car is of high quality, but one of your friends buys one and they happen to get one of the few lemons, then you will naturally disregard the statistics and believe your friend is representative. However, sheer chance would require some people to have faulty cars even if the vast majority were perfectly fine. Thats one of the reasons why we have to look at samples of sufficient size before we can generalize.

The problem with alternative medicine is that its practitioners do not regard the natural history of chronic illness, the placebo effect, the regression to the mean, their desire to see improvement, and many other factors that when taken into consideration usually show that the treatment is no better than placebo.

If you visit a website where the majority of people complain about psychotropic medications, then you will naturally assume that those medications do not work and are very dangerous. However, you have to ask yourself is that a representative sample? There are always people, no matter what the treatment, who will not get better and who will experience severe side effects. If I visited a Buddhist website, then most people would endorse Buddhism as the truth, but is that necessarily true?

Granted, the pharmaceutical industry and physicians have not always been upfront and straightforward with the public about the medications they endorse, but even publicly-funded studies have shown efficacy in a majority of people. It is reasonable to prefer evidence-based treatment to the alternative. Conspiracy theories about drug companies -- although often based in reality -- can lead people to disregard certain lines of evidence that could be very harmful to patients.

Just a few things to keep in mind. :)

I have gone for acupuncture for insomnia and depression before and it's really helped me. But it is not cheap, which is a problem for access for lower-income people. And if you do have insurance, there is a cap on the amount you can claim. Mine's $300. When treatments are $60 each, that amount doesn't go very far.

I have had great results from accupuncture, it made me instantly happy to the point of laughing when the accupuncturist put the needle in that one spot in the ear, I had not expected to have those sort of results, it probably wasn't placebo effect because I was just trying accumpuncture because maybe it might work, but I wasn't really expecting any results.

The reason why I don't use it to treat my depression is because I would haveto do it daily or at least every other day, it takes about an hour and it costs like $50 to $90 for one visit, so I just can't afford it... who can? only the very rich who also have an extra hour to spare every other day. It's cheaper to take $30 of meds every day.
If accupuncture could be made affordable, like $15 a session and I could afford to do it every day or at least every other day (because the effects really don't last that long) then I would definately choose it over meds.