A New Study About External Qigong

External Qigong is a form of energy medicine, and a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM). There is a limited amount of scientific evidence supporting external Qigong. There is also limited scientific evidence supporting the existence of Qi. Because of this some think that studying medical modalities such as Qigong is a waste of time and money. They say that any beneficial effects that might be seen, at best, only occur because of the placebo effect. The truth is, they may be right. But, I don’t think the verdict is in.

I would like to present a study that was recently published in the journal of Clinical Rheumatology in 2008:

Chen KW, Perlman A, Liao JG, Lam A, Staller J, Sigal LH. Effects of external qigong therapy on osteoarthritis of the knee: A randomized controlled trial. Clinical Rheumatology. 2008;27:1497-1505

This study can be accessed simply by googling the name.

There are different levels of quality of research. One way of measuring the quality of a randomized controlled trial is using the JADAD scale. The scale asks three questions:

Was the study randomized?
Was the study double blind?
Was there a description of withdrawals and dropouts?

This study was randomized, double-blinded, and described the number of drop-outs from each group, so this study does get a score of 3 on the JADAD scale, which is a good sign that it is a well-done study.

Also, the study was funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. I simply point this out so that readers will note that the study wasn’t done by woo quack number 45, it was carried out by respectable institutions.

The study used two different healers during the trial and each individual healer was compared against the sham treatment. Interestingly, they found that one healer was not able to do any better than the sham treatment, while the other treatment was able to cause a statistically significant difference in pain, functionality, and total WOMAC score. WOMAC is an osteoarthritis survey that measures things like pain and stiffness via various questions. So, although the study is by no means conclusive, it does suggest the possibility that external Qigong may work as a treatment for osteoarthritis when done by a high-quality healer. But as the paper itself says, more research is still very badly needed before we can draw any conclusions.

The discussion of the study is not outrageous or overly optimistic of the results. They think that the difference in the outcomes of the healers shows that individual Qigong healers must be studied because they might have different healing abilities. This might seem like they are making excuses for the technique not working as well as they wanted it to. But think about it. If you put ten people in a row and gave them soccer balls, pianos, tennis racquets, anything, would they not have different skill levels. Would some not be better than others? Why should healers be any different?

There is much more to the discussion section of this paper where limitations of the study and future research directions are discussed. If you are interested I suggest you go take a look for yourself. If you have any questions I will try and answer them.