For at least 2,000 years, Chinese healers have used acupuncture to treat pain and other ailments. Now Western doctors want to test that works.
There is little controversy that people feel better after receiving the treatment, in which fine needles are deeply inserted into the skin at specific points of the body. But they benefit from own acupuncture, or simply get a placebo effect?
The debate was boosted last week by a study in the magazine Arthritis and research attention. Researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston found that the 455 patients with painful knee arthritis among, acupuncture was given no relief than sham treatment.
In fact, 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, point out, the patients in both treatment received from groups with needles and electrical stimulation; the main difference was that in the Sham group, needles not are inserted as deeply and stimulation was much shorter.
In the real world, however, a trained acupuncturist who customize the treatment of a patient's specific symptoms. But in this study, the patients of the "real" acupuncture group all those needles received 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 standards of Western research to an ancient healing art.
"They argue that there is no really inactive acupuncture points - virtually anywhere you put a needle in the body is an active point", said Dr. Alex Moroz, a trained acupuncturist who directs the musculoskeletal rehabilitation program at the University of New York. "There is a body of literature that argues that the approach to study 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 answer just as in the treatment and placebo groups would prove that the drug doesn't work, says.
"We really work with acupuncturists who are trained in traditional Chinese style and asked that devise 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 fueled speculation that the prick of a needle, either real acupuncture or a false version, can influence the way the body processes and transmits signals of pain. A 2007 study of 1,200 patients of back pain, funded by the insurance companies in Germany, showed that about half the patients in both real and fake acupuncture groups had less pain after treatment, compared with only 27 per cent of those receiving physical therapy or other traditional aftercare.
When the German scientists marked how much pain medication of patients who use, detected a noticeable difference between real acupuncture and the sham treatment. Only 15 percent of the patients in the group that requires drugs additional 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 additional pain 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 has changed the way of the experienced body pain.
Another study, funded by the national institutes of health and published in 2004, found that acupuncture significantly reduced pain and function improved in patients of arthritis of the knee compared with knee of treatment or Sham routine care.
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