Regimes: Acupuncture offers relief of headache

For chronic headaches, the best treatment can be one of the oldest: acupuncture.

In 1998, the national institutes of health accepted acupuncture as an alternate useful treatment for headaches, but cautioned that there was no sufficient clinical trials to draw firm conclusions about its effectiveness. Now a systematic review of studies by 2007 concludes that acupuncture provides further relief medication or a placebo.

The report, which appears in the December edition of anesthesia and Analgesia, revised 25 randomized controlled trials in adults that lasted more than four weeks. In seven trials comparing acupuncture with medication, the researchers found that 62 percent of 479 patients had significant response to acupuncture and only 45 per cent to the medicine.

Fourteen trials with a total of 961 patients, compared with a placebo acupuncture treatment in which patients were brought to believe that they were receiving acupuncture. Of these, 53 per cent which is some pain relief with acupuncture, compared with 45 percent who felt better with placebo. In four trials comparing acupuncture with massage, massage worked better than acupuncture, but these studies were too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.

"People who receive acupuncture prefer medication, due to possible side effects of drugs," said Dr. Tong j. Gan, a co-author of the study and Professor of Anesthesiology at Duke. "This is an alternative therapy that is starting to move into the mainstream."

?More articles in health? a version of this article was printed on 16 December 2008, on page D6 of the New York Edition.