“Acupuncture provides more relief from various types of chronic pain than does usual care and should be considered a valid therapeutic option, the authors of a meta-analysis concluded.”
A meta-analysis is when a group of researches read through many other studies and write up a research report that qualifies as its own study.
Much of the difficulty acupuncture has had with gaining recognition by the medical community stems from the difficulty in running a randomized controlled double-blind study. The biggest problem has been creating a control group. When we test a pill, we can use a placebo, but how do we pretend to put needles in the body? The solution is called “sham acupuncture,” which is when needles are just inserted into the skin and not the flesh beneath, or are inserted in a place of the body that is not one of the traditional acupuncture points. There are two problems with this.
An insertion into the skin is not the most common way to practice acupuncture, but an entire school of thought coming out of Japan dictates that it can be as or more effective to insert the needles just into the skin, than into the flesh beneath. I myself practice one of these styles, called Japanese Meridian Therapy. I often use it with patients who are very weak or sensitive to needles. Thus, a skin insertion is not sham at all.
Inserting a needle into a place that is not a “point” will often work better for a condition than a standard point. We call these “a-shi” points, which translates to “that’s it!” because they are tender to palpation.
This study mentions that despite these pitfalls, real acupuncture outperformed sham acupuncture, which has not always been the case, as I discuss in the migraine article.
The difficulty in doing a study has led previous authors to dismiss acupuncture’s efficacy, thereby creating an idea in the medical world that acupuncture does not work. Not all authors took this route, many suggested further studies were necessary. That a meta-analysis was undertaken and demonstrates that acupuncture can function like a proper study is wonderful for the advancement of Eastern medicine in the West.
Kelsey Healing Arts 