Acupuncture: Nonsense with Needles (1993)
 

[Quackwatch] Immediately before and after the visit of former President Richard M. Nixon to the People’s Republic of China in 1972, reports circulated in the West suggesting that major surgery could be accomplished with acupuncture as the only anesthetic agent. The impression was given that acupuncture was widely used and could be applied in high-risk cases, in children, in the aged, and in veterinary surgery. Perhaps the best-known rumor about “acupuncture anesthesia” was that The New York Times’s noted political analyst James Reston had his appendix removed with acupuncture as the anesthetic. Whatever the reasons for the currency of these ideas, they were, every single one of them, untrue.

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