It's hard to explain on the board the technicalities of why these studies are indeed bogus. too long and boring.
Here is a technical walk thru on this vaunted SLoan Kettering so called clinical study that reveals why accupuncture is just a placebo (hint it's a meta analysis not a clinical study)
Study commentary
Some exercpts
[quote]Well, it�s not exactly a study, it�s a meta-analysis that aggregates a whole lot of acupuncture studies in which this most popular of woos is administered to patients with chronic pain from a variety of causes. It�s also being promoted all over the place with painfully credulous headlines
....mixing studies that compare acupuncture to no treatment, to sham treatment, or to sham treatment and no treatment are comparing apples and oranges in a way. Pooling such studies is inherently problematic...Here�s a hint: -5 (the difference between sham acupuncture and �real� acupuncture) is not clinically significant. The only way you can even approach clinical significance is to compare no-acupuncture controls versus acupuncture, in which case you�re adding placebo effects into any other effect observed, even if that effect is real (which I highly doubt it to be). Indeed, Vickers et al labor mightily to try to convince readers that this tiny effect, if it exists, is not just statistically significant, but clinically significant. They doth protest too much, methinks. In fact, I very much like how the grand master of the scientific analysis of �complementary and alternative medicine� (CAM), Edzard Ernst, put it:

Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, said the study �impressively and clearly� showed that the effects of acupuncture were mostly due to placebo. �The differences between the results obtained with real and sham acupuncture are small and not clinically relevant. Crucially, they are probably due to residual bias in these studies. Several investigations have shown that the verbal or non-verbal communication between the patient and the therapist is more important than the actual needling. If such factors would be accounted for, the effect of acupuncture on chronic pain might disappear completely.� [/quote]

The earlier blog referred to above can be found here Vickers debunk
[quote]The Vickers acupuncture meta-analysis, despite the authors� claims, does not reveal anything new about the acupuncture literature, and does not provide support for use of acupuncture as a legitimate medical intervention. The data show that there is a large difference in outcome when an unblinded comparison is made between treatment and no treatment � an unsurprising result that is of no clinical relevance and says nothing about acupuncture itself.

The comparison between true acupuncture and sham acupuncture shows only a small difference, which is likely not clinically significant or perceptible. More importantly, this small difference is well within the degree of bias and noise that are inherent to clinical trials. Researcher bias, publication bias, outlying effects, and researcher degrees of freedom are more than enough to explain such a small difference. In other words � this data is insufficient to reject the null hypothesis, even if we don�t consider the high implausibility of acupuncture.

Further, meta-analysis itself is an imperfect tool that often does not predict the results of large, rigorous, definitive clinical trials. The best acupuncture trials, those that are well-blinded and include placebo acupuncture, show no specific effects.
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I'd welcome the input of Maria and Klo (Karen) who actually understands studies in this discussion. While I can disagree with their conclusions, they really do know the statistical signficance calculations and miscalculations, as well as the importance of double blind studies etc etc that none of the newspapers or magazines do
I've never doubted accupunture is a placebo, and this meta analysis does not refute that. IMO The reason accupunture works on less than 50% of oral cancer patients for saliva is that half of us do not meet the basic criteria for a placebo to work: the belief unsupported by fact that it will. Half of us just are very suggestible to the extent that a placebo needs. But hey, I'm glad for the half that is.
Charm