Acupuncture is an effective treatment for chronic pain, according to a new study comparing real acupuncture with a placebo version and usual care alone. Researchers from the
University of Southampton, with colleagues in the UK and the US, analyzed raw individual patient data.
This approach allows for more statistically precise results—for 17,922 participants enrolled in 29 high quality, randomized trials, which took place over a number of years, that measured how well acupuncture relieved chronic pain associated with chronic back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, shoulder pain, and chronic headache. The trials compared the pain relief benefit of acupuncture to either usual care alone, to sham (placebo) acupuncture in which the needles are inserted superficially or at a non-traditional site, while others compared all three methods.
The study, published in the
Archives of Internal Medicine, shows for each of the four conditions, acupuncture’s pain relief benefit was statistically superior to both usual care and placebo acupuncture.
According to lead author Andrew Vickers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, many of the estimated three million American adults who receive acupuncture treatment each year use it to ease chronic pain, but its clinical impact has never been convincingly demonstrated. Vickers is also attending research methodologist of the study.
“There are very few treatments for chronic pain supported by the findings of an individual patient data meta-analysis such as ours, which uses a large number of patients taking part in high quality, randomized trials and we hope these findings will inform future clinical and policy decisions for acupuncture,” says Vickers.