AS WELL; Study acupuncture, click a needle at a time

For at least 2,000 years, Chinese healers have used acupuncture to treat pain and other ailments. Now Western doctors want proof that it works.

There is little dispute that people feel better after receiving treatment, in which thin needles are deeply inserted in the skin at specific points of the body. But they benefit from own acupuncture, or simply get a placebo effect?

The debate was fueled last week by a study in the journal of arthritis care research. Researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston found that 455 patients with arthritis of the painful knee, acupuncture not delivered any relief than sham treatment.

Actually, patients got both treatments significant pain relief - an average reduction of a point on a scale of 1 to 7. And critics argue that the study was poorly designed.

On the one hand drawn patients in treatment of both groups received with needles and electrical stimulation; the main difference is that in the Sham group, needles not inserted as deeply and stimulation was much shorter in duration.

However, in the real world, a trained acupuncturist could customize treatment for the patient's specific symptoms. But in this study, the patients of the "real" acupuncture group needles received all inserted in the same way.

In other words, rather than prove that acupuncture does not work, the study may suggest that it works even when given bad. But the real lesson, say supporters of acupuncture, is how difficult it can be applied West research standards to an ancient healing art.

"People argue that there really is no acupuncture inactive points - almost where you put a needle into the body is an active point", said Dr. Alex Moroz, a trained acupuncturist who directs the musculoskeletal rehabilitation program at New York University. "There is a body of literature that argues that the approach to the study of acupuncture does not lend itself to Western reductionist scientific method".

But the author of the main study, Dr. Maria e. Suarez-Almazor, notes that the sham treatment was developed with the help of trained acupuncturists. In a study of the drug, an equal treatment and placebo groups would the medication does not work, says.

"We have really worked with acupuncturists who are trained in traditional Chinese style and asked that they have a farce that would be credible," said Dr. Suarez-Almazor. "Do not plan a study seeking to show that acupuncture did not work. The results came out with no difference between groups. "

Research at MD Anderson and other recent studies of acupuncture have fueled speculation that the prick of a needle of acupuncture real or a false version, can influence the way the body processes and transmits signals of pain. A 2007 study of 1,200 patients back pain, funded by the insurance companies in Germany, showed that about half of the patients in both real and sham acupuncture Group had less pain after the treatment, compared with only 27 percent of those receiving physical therapy or other traditional aftercare.

When the German researchers tracked how much pain medication of patients who use, detected a noticeable difference between the real acupuncture and the sham treatment. Only 15 percent of patients in the acupuncture group requires drugs extra pain, compared with 34 percent in the Group of farce. The group receiving conventional therapy of back was even worse than those who received Sham Acupuncture: 59 percent of patients need pain extra pills.

The researchers who published their findings in Archives of Internal Medicine, speculate that insert needle in or around an area of pain may have caused a "super placebo" effect, playing a series of reactions that changed the way in which the experienced body pain.

Another study, funded by the national institutes of health and published in 2004, found that acupuncture significantly reduced pain and improved function in the patients of arthritis of knee compared to sham knee care treatment or routine.