The use of medical treatments based on alternative practices – even under labels like “integrative” and “complementary” – is unfortunately common among humans, as has been covered in this magazine many times. But the notion of using treatments which lack evidence of safety and efficacy on the most defenseless of living beings – animals – is just as important.
People who use – or advocate for the use of – health practices that are without scientific proof (and often based on theoretical foundations that make less sense than flat Earth theories) often defend the practice by arguing that patients should be free to choose what they do to and with their bodies. But what freedom does an animal have? An adult human has the right to choose whether or not to seek treatment as they see fit. Children and animals don’t have this prerogative: they are at the mercy of their caregivers.
Recently, it was reported that a rescued penguin was being treated in Rio de Janeiro for spinal inflammation. The novelty was that the treatment included acupuncture, music, and cannabinoids. But what evidence supports and justifies the use of these practices and substances on penguins or any other animals, whether wild or domestic?
A search in scientific literature reveals that there is basically none. A systematic review published in 2006 examined 31 studies that used acupuncture on domestic animals. Evidence of effectiveness in treating any condition: zero.
Another review, published in 2017, highlighted the low methodological quality of animal acupuncture clinical trials. It also noted that most of the studies were narrative – in essence, the authors told stories instead of analysing data. Of course, if storytelling could prove anything in health, then chloroquine would cure COVID.
Just like acupuncture in humans, veterinary acupuncture is no more than a placebo, as has been shown multiple times. Animals may react to the placebo effect for various reasons – such as conditioning, or the comfort generated by the caring attention from surrounding humans – but there is also something called “proxy placebo”: the animal continues to suffer as before, or even more, while the observing humans falsely believe their situation has improved.
Beyond the issue of scientific evidence, acupuncture in animals doesn’t even make sense according to acupuncture’s own logic, which claims that the human body is traversed by meridians connecting vital energy points. Maps of these meridians are widely available (indeed, they’re so widely available that different schools of acupuncture use wildly different maps). But who mapped the meridians of a penguin’s body? Are there millennia-old schools of Traditional Antarctic Medicine?
Veterinary acupuncture manuals suggest that acupuncture points are simply transposed from humans to animals. This might explain, as pointed out by veterinarian David Ramey, author of a review on acupuncture in horses, why the practice describes a “gallbladder meridian” in equines… even though horses don’t have a gallbladder.
Medications like cannabinoids have never been tested on penguins, so we cannot know the appropriate dosage or side effects. And I’ll leave it to readers to judge who decided that listening to Enya calms penguins… or even humans.
One enthusiast of alternative veterinary therapies referred to the “treatments” imposed on the poor penguin as “more innovative and respectful practices that significantly reduce the need for allopathic medications.” It’s complicated for a practice to be both ancient and innovative. And to whom is this respectful? Perhaps to certain ideological prejudices – like those who use “allopathic” as a pejorative term – but certainly not to the poor, defenceless penguin, who has been prodded with needles and subjected to Orinoco Flow.
