15/06/2026
🧐 One of the most important lessons in healthcare is that correlation and causation are not the same thing.
Take chronic back pain as an example. Someone has an MRI scan and it reveals a disc bulge, arthritis, or another structural change. It can be very tempting to join the dots and assume the problem has been found.
The difficulty is that many people with no pain at all have exactly the same findings.
That does not mean scans are useless. Far from it. They can be incredibly valuable. The challenge is deciding what a finding actually means. Is it the cause of the symptoms? Is it contributing to them? Or is it simply something that happens to be there?
How those questions are answered can influence everything that follows.
If a finding is assumed to be the cause without good evidence, people can end up undergoing treatments that do not address the real problem. In some cases that may mean unnecessary medication. In others it may mean invasive procedures, lengthy recovery periods, significant expense, or exposure to risks that ultimately bring little benefit because the original problem has not been properly understood.
The same tendency can be found throughout healthcare and the wider wellness industry. A supplement, a scan result, a blood test, a hormone level, a food intolerance, a postural assessment, or whatever the latest health trend happens to be can all point us towards a possible explanation. The difficulty arises when a single observation is treated as a complete explanation.
This is particularly relevant when strong claims are being made. Social media is full of people promoting diets, supplements, tests, gadgets, and treatment programmes with great confidence. The problem is that confidence can be very persuasive, even when the evidence behind a claim is weak or absent.
Before accepting a claim, it is worth asking what evidence actually exists to support it.
Not all evidence carries the same weight. A case report can suggest an idea. A collection of similar cases can make that idea look more convincing. Observational studies can identify patterns across larger groups of people. Randomised controlled trials then ask a more demanding question: if we try to account for chance, expectation, bias, natural recovery, and coincidence, does the effect still remain? Systematic reviews take this a step further by examining the findings across multiple studies.
None of these methods is perfect, but together they help us move beyond anecdotes and assumptions. They give us a more reliable way of assessing whether a treatment is genuinely helping, and whether the explanation being offered is likely to be correct.
The issue is not whether an idea comes from conventional medicine or complementary medicine. The issue is the quality of the evidence supporting it.
Different interventions also carry different levels of risk. If a treatment is invasive, expensive, irreversible, or associated with significant side effects, it becomes increasingly important to be confident that the diagnosis is correct and that the proposed treatment is likely to help.
Acupuncture is a minimally invasive intervention with a strong safety record when practised by appropriately trained practitioners, and it has now been studied in hundreds of randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews. Strong evidence exists for some conditions, including chronic low back pain, knee osteoarthritis, migraine prevention, tension-type headache, and post-operative nausea and vomiting. For other conditions, the evidence is encouraging but not yet conclusive. For others still, we simply do not know.
That should not be seen as a weakness. Human beings are complicated. Symptoms rarely arise from a single cause, and healthcare decisions are often made in the presence of uncertainty.
Perhaps the goal is not certainty but clarity: understanding what is well supported, what looks promising, and where questions still remain.
That approach may be less exciting than bold claims and miracle cures, but it is far more likely to lead us in the right direction.
To discuss how acupuncture & massage might support your health & wellbeing journey, get in touch with me:
📞 01274 003 008 (call or WhatsApp)
📧 [email protected]
🔗 https://ki-acupuncture.co.uk
💬 Ki Acupuncture () on Facebook/Instagram
🦋&🧵
📍Clinics located at:
• The Tower Clinic, Cookridge (Leeds)
• Rooms@1900, Calverley (Pudsey)
• Holding Space, Shipley (Bradford)
⏰ Opening hours:
• Monday–Friday 9am–8pm
• Saturday 9am–5pm
Richard Ashton BSc (Hons) Acupuncture Lic. Ac., Dip. (Tuina), MBAcC
British Acupuncture Council member: https://acupuncture.org.uk
