It never fails to amaze me that seemingly rational people continue to seek out witch doctor treatments for anything more complicated than a massage:

On the same shift I saw two very sick patients, both of whom were under the care of chiropractors before they decided to pay us a visit in the Emergency Department. The first was an old woman with a one week history of dyspnea, chest pain, and a cough. Her chiropractor had diagnosed her with a ìdisplaced rib,î and had been dilligently popping it back into place every day for the previous week. After a simple set of vital signs revealing low blood pressure, a slow heart rate, and a slightly low temperature, not to mention a chest x-ray which showed a huge unilateral pleural effusion, it was not hard to come up with the diagnosis of pneumonia with sepsis.
ìHe [the chiropractor] said she didnít have a fever and she wasnít coughing anything up,î said the sister. [. . .]
The second patient was a 70-year-old man who finally came in after a week of ineffectual adjustments for ìmuscle achesî and general malaise which had evolved, by the time we saw him, into a vague intermittant chest pain related to exertion but which the chiropractor insisted, apparently, was some kind of subluxation. The EKG told the true story, an evolving myocardial infarction. My patient would have probably died if his son hadnít raised the alarm and insisted his father see some real doctors.

Meanwhile, this article reports that researchers have determined that acupuncture works. But the same research study concluded that fake acupuncture, where the needles are inserted shallowly and in the wrong places, also works:

The results suggest that both acupuncture and sham acupuncture act as powerful versions of the placebo effect, providing relief from symptoms as a result of the convictions that they engender in patients.

My conclusion: On one hand, if you stick pins in people who are complaining about something, then some of them will eventually quit complaining. On the other hand, if you take pins out of some people who were previously complaining, then some of them will also stop complaining.