There are two ways of dealing with the agony of a bad back. The first is to invite a largish bone-cruncher, otherwise known as an osteopath, to arrange your limbs into a pattern of exquisite vulnerability, and wait until he drops the full weight of his body on to your spine. There will then be a palpable crack as two of your lumbar vertebrae are driven into realignment; a few days later you are back on your feet; the only drawback is that if he gets it wrong, you may never walk again.

The second approach is to do nothing. Throughout a lifetime of back trouble, during which I have experienced every conceivable treatment from traction to ultrasound, biofeedback to chiropractic, I have found that doing nothing is the best therapy of all. A few weeks of hobbling, complaining and generally making other people’s lives a misery, and the pain recedes. Nature, it appears, prefers a straight back to a crooked one, and aims to help it readjust, if given the chance.

The latest research into this most intensively researched of all human conditions challenges my theory head on. It suggests that acupuncture works; that the ancient Chinese art of sticking long needles into the skin works better than physiotherapy, drugs and all the conventional cures that doctors recommend. This is not just any medical study, it is the University of Regensburg’s medical study, conducted on 1,100 bad-back sufferers by Michael Haake. And if the name suggests to you a character like Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) from the Beachcomber column, that may be no coincidence.

Well intentioned as the good doctor is, all he has demonstrated is the old adage that there is no sucker like a crippled sucker. The patients who are offered the choice of several weeks of gradually reducing pain or else the opportunity of sampling the latest batch of snake oil will generally go for the snake oil. They like the instant remedy, and the phoney stories that go with it.

Just as the quacks who used to go round selling miracle cures for every ailment from hair lips to goitres relied on tall tales of how their formula was distilled from ancient plant cures used for generations by mysterious tribes of indeterminate origin, so today’s alternative gurus draw on mythology at the expense of science. It is tosh, of course, but it is the kind of tosh that people want to hear.

The British Acupuncture Council trots out something similar when it suggests that “according to traditional Chinese philosophy our health is dependent on the body’s motivating energy – known as qi – moving in a smooth and balanced way through a series of meridians (channels) beneath the skin”. By inserting needles, the acupuncturist “can stimulate the body’s own healing response and help to restore its natural balance”. The council will be delighted to learn that out of Dr Haake’s 1,162 back sufferers, nearly half of those on traditional Chinese-style acupuncture (47.6 per cent) recovered more quickly than those being treated by conventional means. It will be less thrilled to find that nearly as many (44.2 per cent) of those who had needles jammed in any-old-how also benefited.

The team from Regensburg concluded, rightly, that the results were confusing. Could it be, they wondered, that acupuncture has no effect at all, or that it works but it doesn’t matter how well or badly it is done? Alternatively, simply taking part in an extended medical trial might have concentrated the mind – participants offered a placebo often do just as well as the rest.

I have an alternative explanation. The world is divided into the sceptical and the credulous, with the balance tilted firmly towards the latter. The credulous are those who believe implicitly in the concept of alternative medicine, who warm to faith healing, mysterious “black boxes” that can cure at a distance, the laying-on of hands, and the multifarious accounts of miraculous remedies achieved by ingesting the roots of a South American plant mingled with the secretions of the Brazilian tapir.

They are the willingly gullible; their eyes widen as they talk of holistic cures, of hypnotherapy, homoeopathy, herbalism or healing with animals. They are full of complaints about the idiocies of ordinary doctors and the inadequacies of the NHS, and relish instead tales of unexplained cures and extraordinary recoveries. They ignore any challenges to their deeply held convictions, and are simply uninterested in statistics that show the failure of alternative medicine to stand up to normal testing.

All this gives them a seemingly invincible weapon in their fight against illness. It is a collective suspension of disbelief – a faith in the unknowable that transcends the tedium of mere science. Why suffer the rigours of a long bout of painful therapy when you can have your meridians twitched? Whole schools of modern therapy are built on the theory that discovering the strength of the inner self is a more effective route to good health than hours spent hanging around an outpatient clinic. Ask Carole Caplin or Cherie Blair. True faith, they would argue, is the ultimate medication.

And, of course, it is a lot more fun than the dreary scepticism that infects the rest of us. While they experience transcendence, we simply see a row of ridiculous needles. We do not believe in strange and unexplained cures, so we lack the capacity to benefit from them.

It would be nice, perhaps, to jettison the great advances of medical science, and embrace the alternative world, but it’s surprisingly difficult to become an overnight air-head. Besides, I’ve simply got to stop. My back is killing me.

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