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[email protected] The SAR symposium has become a regular feature of the acupuncture research calendar. It started with a small group of people who longed for an open arena in which to discuss acupuncture research without any professional tensions or barriers, and celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. It is a worthy aim to establish a successful society in this under-funded field, and I was pleased to be able to attend this year’s symposium and meet many acupuncture researchers. I have summarised a selection of the presentations for readers to share. Please note that further details of the symposium can be obtained from the society’s website (www.acupunctureresearch.org). The meeting started with an overview of the symposium by Helen Langevin, one of the cochairs. Ted Kaptchuk’s lunch time lecture, Should acupuncture be researched or should we research the research? was entertaining and enthusiastic. He raised some thought provoking questions about the value and meaning of placebocontrolled randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in acupuncture research. Research into external generalisability and the question of whether the results of RCTs have ecological validity raise serious concerns about the uncritical acceptance of the RCT as the sole basis of accurate clinical knowledge. He suggested that the ideal placebocontrolled RCT is the least subjective, fairest, most explicit and standardised procedure ethically possible for generating evidence of clinical efficacy, although it might have its own biases, distortions and systematic errors. Kaptchuk said it may be that clinical truth is independent of the method of its production. He added: “The claim that medical research or any other scientific research can be totally objective and free of subjectivity is not congruent with what we know from the philosophy and sociology of science. Evidence does not speak for itself and must be judged for quality and likelihood of error. Interpretation is never completely independent of a scientist’s beliefs, preconceptions, or theoretical commitments.” The acupuncture community in the Western world has roots in a radical critique of biomedicine, he said. Acupuncture researchers have a parallel responsibility to examine research critically and to perform the research, he concluded. Kathleen Hui presented functional MRI images of 24 acupuncture-naïve healthy volunteers after they had received manual acupuncture stimulation to ST36 in the right leg, by rotating at the rate of 1Hz for two minutes. The same procedure was repeated once after a three minute interval. For control intervention, tactile stimulation was performed over the acupoint. This report of an fMRI study of acupuncture focusing on the cerebellum, which was said to be the first, found that the images of volunteers who experienced de qi, acupuncture-specific sensation, showed extensive reductions in the signal in the anterior and posterior lobes of the vermis, medial and lateral hemispheres of the cerebellum, indicating that multiple regions related to nociception, cognition, affect, balance, and sensorimotor functions were involved. In addition, a similar response with reductions in signal intensity was observed in the cerebral limbic and subcortical network and in the brainstem. Interestingly, in the occasional subjects who experienced sharp pain, signal increases predominated in the entire brain. She concluded by suggesting that the cerebellum 6594/37 AIM22(1) 17/3/04 12:18 PM Page 44