Acupuncture eases some kinds of chronic pain – and it’s not just a placebo effect at work, researchers who looked at data from nearly 18,000 patients found.
An estimated 3 million American adults get acupuncture treatments annually; still, there “remains considerable controversy as to its value,” the researchers wrote in a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
But they found that for back and neck pain, chronic headache, osteoarthritis and shoulder pain, acupuncture works better than no treatment and better than “sham” acupuncture – done, for example, with needles inserted superficially or with needles that retract into the handles instead of going into the skin.
“Although the data indicate that acupuncture is more than a placebo, the differences between true and sham acupuncture are relatively modest, suggesting that factors in addition to the specific effects of needling are important contributors to therapeutic effects.”
