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Record W4414085229 · doi:10.1177/19336586251360951

The Famous Sir William Osler: A Physician Acupuncturist and His Pain

2025· article· en· W4414085229 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Arthur Yin Fan

Bibliographic record

VenueMedical Acupuncture · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Medicine Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDry needlingAcupunctureAlternative medicineAcupuncture needleBloodlettingCriticismMedical professionClinical Practice

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Acupuncture, an integral part of traditional Chinese medicine, has been practiced for over 2,500 years. Dr. William Osler, a renowned physician in Canada and the United States during the late 1800s, was also an acupuncturist. He learned acupuncture from Dr. Sydney Ringer, a prominent British physiologist and medical doctor. Osler developed a method for treating lower back pain that focused on local acupoints, utilizing long hatpins. He advocated for acupuncture in his teaching for four decades and included it in his seminal textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine: Designed for the Use of Practitioners and Students of Medicine . In 1879, Osler experienced a failed case in his acupuncture practice. A wealthy patient’s severe lower back pain was aggravated after treatment, leading to public criticism and professional humiliation. This incident caused some scholars to undervalue acupuncture and speculate that Osler ceased practicing it thereafter. The reasons for such painful experiences in acupuncture are generally attributed to four factors: The first is poor needle quality and size: The needles used by Osler were rigid and had a diameter of ∼1.00 mm, which is significantly larger than modern acupuncture needles. The second is inadequate needling technique: Proper training and precision are crucial for painless acupuncture. The third is improper needle placement: Inserting needles into subcutaneous vessel walls or skin follicles can cause discomfort. The fourth is patient-specific reactions: Conditions such as hyperalgesia may increase sensitivity, requiring the use of distal acupoints rather than local ones. To minimize pain and adverse effects, effective communication with patients is essential. It is worth noting that the rate of severe pain caused by acupuncture is only 0.007%, and the risk of other adverse effects is very low.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.702
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.212
Teacher spread0.206 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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