Some people swear that regular sessions of acupuncture help relieve their back pain and headaches. And now there’s evidence they may be right.
In a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers led by Andrew Vickers, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, report that acupuncture is effective in reducing people’s chronic pain — more so than standard pain treatment and slightly better than using sham needles, suggesting that the benefits of real acupuncture are due to something more than the placebo effect.
The studies result showed a clear and “robust” effect of acupuncture in relieving chronic pain in the back, neck and shoulders, as well as pain due to osteoarthritis and headaches.
Compared with people undergoing sham needle treatments, those receiving acupuncture reported drops in back and neck pain of 0.23 standard deviations, and of 0.55 standard deviations compared with those not using acupuncture at all. On a pain scale of 0 to 100, that meant that among the participants, who started out with an average baseline pain score of 60, pain ratings fell to 30 on average for those who got acupuncture, 35 for those who received fake acupuncture, and 43 for people who got usual care and no acupuncture.
“The effects of acupuncture are statistically significant and different from those of sham or placebo treatments,” says Vickers. “So we conclude that the effects aren’t due merely to the placebo effect.”
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese remedy for a curing a host of chronic ills, from headaches to back pain and menstrual cramps. The practice, like all medical traditions from the East, is built on the concept of maintaining the balance of various body elements — including blood and nutrients along with less measurable ones like the energy force known as chi. Inserting needles at designated point on the body is supposed to intercept or unblock the flow of such elements, and lies at the heart of the centuries-old therapy of acupuncture.
However, these theories are completely foreign, even weird, to Western medicine, which has a harder time accepting unquantifiable entities such as chi. That’s why Western researchers have struggled not only to document objective evidence of acupuncture’s effectiveness, but also to provide some hints about how it may work.
Some doctors say the needles may release endorphins, the pleasure-inducing, painkilling chemicals that saturate the brain and numb pain signals. But such theories can’t fully explain why acupuncture patients say their chronic pain episodes become less frequent and less intense over time, with regular, long-term sessions. Some say the benefits of acupuncture are purely in the mind, a psychological placebo effect. But either way, for many pain patients, acupuncture does provide palpable relief.
Dr. Andrew Avins, one of the study authors, was asked if the treatment works, does it really matter whether the effect is physiological or psychological? His answer? “Perhaps a more productive strategy at this point would be to provide whatever benefits we can for our patients, while we continue to explore more carefully all mechanisms of healing.” In other words, if it works and doesn’t seem to lead to any harms, getting stuck with needles may not be such a weird idea after all.
by Alice Park, Sept 11, 2012, Time Magazine
Contact us for your pain needs today!
