Experts question point of acupuncture
Tuesday March 29th, 2011
There is little evidence that doing acupuncture properly relieves pain - and the risks of the procedure are too high, experts have claimed.
A
new analysis suggests that acupuncture can relieve pain - but so can fake
acupuncture when needles do not penetrate the skin.
Writing the journal Pain, experts say the level of side-effects from acupuncture are too high.
Professor Edzard Ernst, of the Peninsula Medical School, UK, an expert in alternative therapies, called for training for acupuncturists to be improved to eliminate side effects.
Professor Ernst worked with researchers from the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine to analyse some 56 studies.
Between then researchers reported some 38 cases of infection and 42 cases of trauma linked to treatment. There were five deaths. One of the most common complications was penetration of the thorax, causing infection.
Professor Ernst said: "One might argue that, in view of the popularity of acupuncture, the number of serious adverse effects is minute.
"We would counter, however, that even one avoidable adverse event is one too many. The key to making progress would be to train all acupuncturists to a high level of competency.”
Writing in the same journal Dr Harriet Hall concludes: "When a treatment is extensively studied for decades and the evidence continues to be inconsistent, it becomes more and more likely that the treatment is not truly effective. This appears to be the case for acupuncture."
* A second study confirms that fake acupuncture can often be as good as the real thing. The Swedish research, reported in the journal PLoS ONE, found that simulated treatment helped to relieve nausea in cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy.
Researcher Dr Anna Enblom of the Karolinska Intitutet, Stockholm, said: "It’s important to remember that the effects of the treatment are valuable to the patients, even if they can be said to have been caused by unspecific factors, such as the manner in which the patients were taken care of and their positive expectations.
“So our next step is to study which part of the acupuncture procedure actually are of importance, to make possible the use of those components to further increase quality of care.”
Acupuncture: Does it alleviate pain and are there serious risks? A review of reviews. E. Ernst, Myeong Soo Lee, Tae-Young Choi Pain April 2011 Volume 152, Issue 4 doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2010.11.004
Tags: Alternative Therapy | Europe | Pain Relief | UK News
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