I just posted a yesterday on utilizing acupuncture in the treatment of chronic pain. Today the New York Times published a wonderful article, Acupuncture Provides True Pain Relief in Study, by Anahad O’Connor.
The article is evaluating information published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, financed by the National Institues of Health, on over 18,000 patients suffering from osteoarthritis, migraines and chronic pain.
Dr. Andrew Vickers, researcher at Memorial Sloa-Kettering Cancer Center in New York states “We think there’s firm evidence supporting acupuncture for the treatment of chronic pain.”
The meta-analysis included studies that compared acupuncture with usual care, like over-the-counter pain relievers and other standard medicines. It also included studies that used sham acupuncture treatments, in which needles were inserted only superficially, for example, or in which patients in control groups were treated with needles that covertly retracted into handles.
Ultimately, Dr. Vickers and his colleagues found that at the end of treatment, about half of the patients treated with true acupuncture reported improvements, compared with about 30 percent of patients who did not undergo it.
“There were 30 or 40 people from all over the world involved in this research, and as a whole the sense was that this was a clinically important effect size,” Dr. Vickers said. That is especially the case, he added, given that acupuncture “is relatively noninvasive and relatively safe.”
