Although we are constantly told to “engage with the public,” many doctors and academics avoid the media like the plague. This month, like many doctors before me, I walked into a broadcast studio a man and came out an ass.

The story was acupuncture. A major study had been published showing that acupuncture is more effective for back pain than conventional medical treatment, and as I sometimes write about complementary medicine and research methodology I was invited to discuss the study on BBC Radio 4, where nobody can tell that I look about 14.

The very interesting paper (Archives of Internal Medicine 2007;167:1892-8) had three arms. Results from the “sham” and “real” acupuncture arms were indistinguishable—make of that what you will—but both outperformed conventional medical treatment. The patients in the study, I should mention, were people who had already been failed by conventional medical treatment for an average of eight years.

If you're a doctor, you can probably imagine what I …