Acupuncture good for the back, even when fake
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for lower back pain, and either kind performs much better than conventional treatments, German researchers have found.
In their study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on acupuncture for back pain, more than 1,100 patients were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture, sham acupuncture or conventional therapy.
For the sham acupuncture, needles were inserted, but not as deeply as for the real thing.
After six months, in the real acupuncture group, 47 per cent of patients improved. In the sham acupuncture group, 44 per cent did. In the usual care group, 27 per cent got relief.
“Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain,” study co-author Heinz Endres of Ruhr University Bochum said. “Patients experienced not only reduced pain intensity, but also reported improvements in the disability that often results from back pain.”
Findings were in line with a theory that pain messages to the brain can be blocked by competing stimuli. Positive expectations that patients held about acupuncture—or negative expectations about conventional medicine—also could have led to a placebo effect and explained the findings.
James Young, of Chicago's Rush University Medical Centre, said: “We don't understand the mechanisms of these so-called alternative treatments, but that doesn't mean they don't work.”
According to the Matteo Ricci Foundation of Bologna, which is involved in popularising traditional Chinese medicine in the West, acupuncture is regularly used in treating two million people in Italy and more than 700 in 129 countries. More than a million professionals practice the specialty.
In Italy though there is a regulatory gap since any medical doctor can practice it, even without proper training.
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