Those clever well-paid doctors have found a great distraction from the negative publicity that hurtled in their direction recently; they are gunning for alterntive therapies - the NHS should not be spending money on these non-proven non-alopathic approaches. What are they afraid of, their own tricks of the trade might be rumbled? What arrogance to think that theirs is the only gold standard in medicine.

Not everything that involves people can be proved by quantitative research alone, there are too many unkown dynamic variables, many layers of life that could not be documented in quantitative data form.

They cry "there is no evidence for its worth". Those alopathic doctors are blinkered, nay, blind. They choose to be. There is evidence and in the case of acupuncture, about 2000 years' worth of it. Scientific purists do not like anecdote, they don't like personal experience that's brushed aside as 'the placebo affect'; how offensive. Let them prove it by their own stated standards. It would, no doubt, not be too difficult to pick holes in their research methodology.

The polemic they have raised, beautifully seduces the media away from the storm over the doctors' pay deal; its high cost to the NHS is totally masked. We, the public, are distracted from the core problem, the spiralling cost to the NHS of doctors' pay with as yet, unequal returns to the system.

(Sources include BBC radio 4 am and pm programmes.)