Acupuncture found to be pointless

A thorough report by the Australian group ‘friends of science in medicine’ has just been published. It casts considerable doubt about the therapeutic value of acupuncture. As I think it is a report well worth reading, I reproduce (with the permission of the authors) a large section below:

What could be the mechanisms by which acupuncture might work?

The proponents of acupuncture have postulated possible mechanisms involving neurovascular bundles, trigger points, connective tissue fascial planes, electrical impedance, migration of nuclear tracers, and other factors. These studies are flawed, inconclusive, contradict one another, and have not been replicated. However, interest in acupuncture, particularly for analgesia, has been related to the ‘gate control’ theory (R. Melzack and P.D. Wall, “Pain mechanisms: a new theory”). According to this theory, the activation of large sensory fibres (touch pressure and vibration) inhibits transmission of nociceptive  (pain recognising) pathways carried by small unmyelinated nerve fibres. This was postulated to occur in the spinal cord and might explain the effect of ‘rubbing’ the skin to reduce acute pain, the use of ‘counter irritants’, defined by the USA FDA as “externally applied substances that cause irritation or mild inflammation of the skin for the purpose of relieving pain in muscles, joints and viscera distal to the site of application”. It has been suggested that acupuncture could act as a counter irritant. Interest grew, in the 1970s, with the discovery of brain endogenous opioid peptides, which mimic the actions of morphine on pain. These discoveries triggered extensive research, both in China and around the world, on the involvement of endogenous opioid peptides and a plethora of many neuropeptides and purines in acupunctureinduced analgesia (H.M. Langevin et al., “Mechanical signaling through connective tissue: A mechanism for the therapeutic effect of acupuncture,” N. Goldman et al., “Adenosine A1 receptors mediate local anti-nociceptive effects of acupuncture,” Z.Q. Zhao “Neural mechanism underlying acupuncture analgesia”.) The discovery of novel neurotransmitters capable of affecting nociception gave extra impetus to explain some analgesic responses to sensory stimulation (e.g. mini-review on “Acupuncture and endorphins” in Neuroscience Letters). However while the concept that sensory stimulation affects pain sensation is well established, efforts to date have not established that this phenomenon is responsible for acupuncture induced analgesia. Although acupuncture is supposed to be a very specific intervention involving skin penetration with needles and manipulation (twirling), many studies include a plethora of other interventions, assumed to be, to a lesser or greater degree, equivalent. These include acupressure, electro-acupuncture, transcutaneous nerve electrical stimulation (TENS), laser acupuncture, tiny gold beads implanted under the skin, and injection of homeopathic remedies into acupoints. Electro-acupuncture, manipulated by passing electric currents through implanted needles, is widely used and allows a more objective control over stimulating parameters. Electro-acupuncture appears to be able to activate or deactivate a variety of brain regions and promote the release of endogenous opioid peptides, which are responsible for mediating its analgesic effects. Other non-penetrating methods include stimulation with sound, pressure, heat (moxibustion, sometimes with deliberate burn injury), electromagnetic frequencies (laser stimulation, capsicum plaster, an acu-stimulation device such as Electro-acupuncture of Voll [EAV]), chemical (capsicum plaster and Sweet Bee Venom Pharmaco-puncture), vacuum (cupping), color, waving hands over acupoints, and striking the appropriate meridian on an acupuncture doll with a metal hammer (Tong Ren). Even some forms of bloodletting are thought to involve activation of acupuncture points. Because of the aforementioned scientific studies on the neuroscience of nociception, acupuncture seemed to gain somewhat more plausibility than other forms of alternative medicine. Acupuncture has even been said to have positive effects on animals’ cognitive functions.

Acupuncture and the proven principles of Brain Science

Any hypothesis on the mechanism of action of acupuncture and equivalent interventions needs to be placed within the well established, proven principles of the brain sciences. Brain activity is due to the activity of billions of nerve cells, each generating small electrical currents which carry signals from one end to the other of each nerve cell; and, due to communication through the release of small amounts of chemicals, called neurotransmitters, with other nerve cells and with muscle and glands. These electrical and chemical aspects of the nervous system represent the most important foundations of modern brain science.  This principle of organisation and function of the nervous system became well-established by the middle of the 20th Century, thanks to the research of the Australian neuroscientist, Sir John Eccles, Nobel prize-winner in Medicine because of this discovery. Since then, a plethora of neurotransmitter substances have been identified in the brain and in peripheral organs. Amongst these are endogenous opioids, as mentioned above, and other neuropeptides; these are recognised as important potential modulators of brain function.  Not surprisingly, the idea that activating sensory inputs might affect central neural circuits and that, in particular, acupuncture might well work for analgesia, has triggered extensive research.  While there is evidence for the release by various sensory stimuli, including manual acupuncture, of some endogenous opioids and other endogenous chemical mediators potentially capable of modifying pain stimuli, there is little evidence that this is a specific effect related to any anatomical organisation which could correspond to the ‘meridians’ of TCM. In most cases, any physical or chemical sensory stimulus is likely to result in the release of some endogenous anti-nociceptive substances. The highest quality studies have shown that it doesn’t matter where you insert the needles (acupoints or non-acupoints), and that it doesn’t matter whether the skin is penetrated (in one study, touching the skin with a toothpick worked just as well). The one thing that does seem to matter is whether the patient believes in acupuncture.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the brain processes underlying the physiological ‘placebo effect’ in reducing pain perception share similar neurochemical mechanisms with the sensory stimulation caused by acupuncture and other sensory stimulations. Thus the placebo effect is likely to explain many of the subjective improvements of many interventions, including acupuncture. This similarity explains, in part, why it has been so difficult, in practice, to perform satisfactory clinical trials to test the effectiveness of acupuncture separate from the placebo effect.   Another myth is that acupuncture must be effective because it works on animals, and they wouldn’t respond to a placebo. But animals can’t talk to tell us to how they feel; their owners must interpret their responses by observing the animal’s behaviour, and the owners are susceptible to suggestion. They might inadvertently influence the animal’s behavior by giving it more attention or treating it differently in some way. They might be convinced that they see a change in the animal’s behavior and think that it means the animal feels better.

Using acupuncture for its placebo effect 

Recently, the weight of evidence has convinced some acupuncturists that acupuncture works no better than placebo, but they still advocate using it for its placebo effect. Medical ethicists universally condemn using placebos intentionally since it amounts to lying and can destroy trust in the doctor/patient relationship. In reality, placebos don’t do much; their effects tend to be small in magnitude and short in duration. Patients who use them might defer or reject necessary effective treatment. Placebos can waste time and money, and harm can result when patients are deluded into thinking they are getting better when they really are not. One study found that patients with asthma had the same positive subjective responses to placebos as to an asthma inhaler; but objectively, only the patients in the asthma inhaler group had improvements in lung function. The response to placebos was no better than that of patients in a no-treatment control group. This could have serious consequences, since difficulty in perceiving the severity of an asthma attack is a risk factor for asthma-related death.

Is there clinical evidence for effectiveness of acupuncture in clinical medicine?

The proponents of acupuncture, whether as part of holistic TCM or as a separate technique, advertise that acupuncture can cure a wide range of diseases. Acupuncture has been claimed to be effective for addiction (such as alcoholism), allergies, asthma, bronchitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, constipation, depression, diarrhoea, endometriosis, facial tics, fibromyalgia, gastro-esophageal reflux, headaches, high blood pressure, infertility, irregular menstrual cycles, kidney infections, memory problems, multiple sclerosis, pre-menstrual syndrome, polycystic ovarian syndrome, low back pain, menopausal symptoms, menstrual cramps, osteoarthritis, pain of various natures, pharyngitis, post-operative nausea and vomiting, psychological disorders such as anxiety, sciatica, sensory disturbances, sinusitis, spastic colon (often called irritable bowel syndrome), stroke rehabilitation, tendonitis, tennis elbow, tinnitus, urinary problems such as incontinence, sports injuries, sprains, strains, ulcers, and whiplash.

Acupuncture trials and pitfalls 

Clinical research on acupuncture is inherently difficult. The practice of acupuncture is not standardised, and some studies of ‘acupuncture’ are actually of electro-acupuncture, ear acupuncture, or other variants. It’s next to impossible to do double-blind studies, so confounding factors cannot be eliminated. The best studies use a retractable needle in a sheath, so that the patient can’t tell whether the skin has been penetrated or only touched by the needle. The results are highly variable: it’s easy to find studies to support a belief in acupuncture, but it’s even easier to find studies showing that it doesn’t work.  The rationale for acupuncture’s acceptance in some aspects of clinical medicine, particularly in emergency medicine and pain clinics, has begun to crumble on closer examination of the evidence, mostly because of the excessively variable nature of the interventions involved in various studies which did not clarify the nature of the sham interventions used and any placebo effects.   Recent reviews of the effectiveness of  acupuncture on pain in general are rather damning. There have, over several decades, been several thousand acupuncture studies. After all this clinical research, acupuncture has not been clearly demonstrated to be effective for any indication. In short it is more than reasonable to suggest that acupuncture doesn’t work being no more than “a theatrical placebo”.  Traditional Chinese acupuncture is no better for treating menopausal symptoms than a ‘sham’ version using blunt needles, according to a University of Melbourne study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, involving 327 Australian women over 40 who had at least seven moderately hot flushes daily. Half were given ten sessions of standard Chinese medicine acupuncture, where thin needles were inserted into the body at specific points. The others had their skin stimulated with blunt-tipped needles, which had a milder effect without penetrating the skin. After eight weeks of treatment, both had led to a 40% improvement in the severity and frequency of hot flushes; this was sustained six months later. However, there was no statistical difference between the two therapies. The authors said that both groups might have improved as a result of the placebo effect or because attending a clinic to talk about symptoms helped. The authors also noted that hot flushes tended to improve spontaneously with time adding “This was a large and rigorous study, and we are confident there is no additional benefit from inserting needles compared with stimulation from pressuring the blunt needles without skin penetration for hot flushes.”  The most positive results from acupuncture have been for pain and post-operative nausea and vomiting (PONV). But even for those, the evidence is unconvincing. For PONV, the most recent meta-analysis indicated a small effect of P6 acupoint stimulation, but it mixed studies of acupuncture with electro-acupuncture, transcutaneous nerve stimulation, laser stimulation, capsicum plaster, an acu-stimulation device, and acupressure. There were questionable randomisation procedures, incomplete data, and the conclusion of the reviewers (that P6 acupoint stimulation “prevented PONV”) was not justified by the data. There is a lot of ‘noise’ in the data from these studies, but there doesn’t appear to be any ‘signal‘ mixed with the ‘noise’.  It has been shown that the analgesic benefits of acupuncture are partially mediated through placebo effects related to the acupuncturist’s behavior. It is becoming increasingly clear that any reported benefits of acupuncture are largely due to the surrounding ritual, the beliefs of patient and practitioner, and the other nonspecific effects of treatment, not to the needles themselves. The team studying PONV also examined ‘Acupuncture for pelvic and back pain in pregnancy: a systematic review’. They concluded “limited evidence supports acupuncture use in treating pregnancy-related pelvic and back pain. Additional high-quality trials are needed to test the existing promising evidence for this relatively safe and popular complementary therapy”.  A systematic review of acupuncture for various pain conditions found a mix of negative, positive and inconclusive results. Out of 57 systematic reviews, there were only 4 pain conditions for which more than one systematic review reached the same conclusion: in 3 cases, they agreed that it was ineffective, and in only one (neck pain) was it agreed that it was effective.  That finding is suspect, because it doesn’t make sense that a treatment could relieve pain only in one part of the body but not elsewhere.  Over the past 10-15 years the Cochrane collaboration has addressed the efficacy of acupuncture for many of these indications. When clinical trials have been performed properly, lack or insufficient evidence of effectiveness for acupuncture was demonstrated in most cases. The following is a list, not exhaustive, of such trials.  In thirty trials for depression, with 2,812 participants, manual and electro acupuncture were compared with medication; they found no difference between the two groups.  A review by the Cochrane Collaboration on the question ‘Do acupuncture and related therapies help smokers who are trying to quit’ “did not find consistent evidence that active acupuncture or related techniques increased the number of people who could successfully quit smoking”.  A study by RMIT researchers in 2016 showed that acupuncture is no better than placebo for menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes.  A Cochrane Collaboration study (2014) demonstrated no effects on functional dyspepsia. A similar lack of effect on rheumatoid arthritis was demonstrated in 2005.  Even proponents of acupuncture from the team at the RMIT in Melbourne, in their attempt to prove that acupuncture is effective in a “range of health conditions”, admitted, “No solid conclusion of which design is the most appropriate sham control of Ear-acupuncture/ear-acupressure could be drawn in this review”.  Very clear experimental work performed by a University of Melbourne team on one of the projects funded by the NH&MRC on laser acupuncture, “Acupuncture for Chronic Knee Pain published A Randomized Clinical Trial on chronic knee pain”, showed that neither needle nor laser acupuncture significantly improved pain and concluded that their findings did not support acupuncture for these patients.   A paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2008 “Acupuncture to Induce Labor: A Randomized Controlled Trial” concluded “Two sessions of manual acupuncture, using local and distal acupuncture points, administered 2 days before a scheduled induction of labor did not reduce the need for induction methods or the duration of labor for women with a post-term pregnancy”.

Trials not performed sufficiently well and therefore “need to be repeated” 

Despite the several decades of significant funding for, and research on, acupuncture and, in general, on alternative medicines in Australia and around the world, far too often the conclusion from clinical trials is “more research is needed”. The excuses given in the numerous reviews, mostly by the proponents, are  insufficient numbers of patients or trials or insufficient control subjects. The reality is more likely due to the reality that there is an absence of effectiveness. For example, a review on “Acupuncture to treat common reproductive health complaints: An overview of the evidence” concluded “Acupuncture to treat premenstrual syndrome or polycystic ovarian syndrome and other menstrual related symptoms is under-studied, and the evidence for acupuncture to treat these conditions is frequently based on single studies. Conclusion: Further research is needed”. In a review, “Pain Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Australia: A Critical Review”, the authors concluded that, because of the poor design and execution of research papers on pain and alternative medicines, “The quantity and the quality of CAM pain research in Australia is inconsistent with the high utilization of the relevant CAM therapies by Australians. A substantial increase in government funding is required. Collaborative research examining the multimodality or multidisciplinary approach is needed”. It has been claimed that surgery can be performed using only acupuncture anesthesia. A widely publicised picture of a patient allegedly undergoing open-heart surgery under acupuncture anesthesia appears to be a fake: it shows her with an open chest cavity that would make her lungs collapse, she is not on a respirator and a heartbypass machine does not appear to be in use. Also, the incision is in the wrong place for the procedure being described, and the photo is curious in other respects (such as the position of the patient’s head). A recent BBC video of surgery on a conscious patient anaesthetised with acupuncture was similarly misleading. Researchers at the Centre for Complementary Medicine Research at the University of Western Sydney, commenting on studies of acupuncture for menstrual problems stated, “Five systematic reviews were included, and six RCTs. The symptoms of the menopause and of dysmenorrhea have been subject to greater clinical evaluation through RCTs, and the evidence summarised in systematic reviews, than any other reproductive health complaint. The evidence for acupuncture to treat dysmenorrhea and menopause remains unclear, due to small study populations and the presence of methodological bias.  For example, a review on “Acupuncture to treat common reproductive health complaints: An overview of the evidence” concluded “Acupuncture to treat premenstrual syndrome or polycystic ovarian syndrome and other menstrual related symptoms is under-studied, and the evidence for acupuncture to treat these conditions is frequently based on single studies. Conclusion: Further research is needed”.  Many other studies by the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that there was insufficient evidence for recommending the use of acupuncture for the conditions investigated, as listed as follow: ADHD in children and adolescents (2011); autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (2011); Bell’s palsy (2010); cancer-related pain (2015); glaucoma (2013); depression (2010); dysphagia in acute stroke (2008); tennis elbow (2002); ‘fibromyalgia’ (2013); induction of labour (2013); menopausal hot flushes (2013); mumps (2014); nearsightedness in children (2011); hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy in newborn babies (2013); pain in endometriosis (2011); period pain (2011); chronic asthma (1999); urinary incontinence (2013); stroke rehabilitation (2006); uterine fibroids (2010); labour pains (2011); vascular dementia (2007); nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy (2015); obesity (2015). Even TENS appears to give insufficient evidence for improving dementia (2003).

Reasonable trials with evidence for small effects.

A Cochrane study on acupuncture and dry needling for low back pain, based on 35 randomised clinical trials in 2005, reported a very small effect. Another Cochrane study in 2009 suggested that acupuncture should be considered a treatment option for migraine prophylaxis, despite finding that “there was no evidence of an effect of true acupuncture over sham interventions”.  A Cochrane study in 2006 found moderate evidence for a small improvement in chronic neck pain while a review in 2009 suggested that there was benefit from the use of acupuncture to treat Tension-type headache  Almost all trials of alternative medicines seem to end up with the conclusion “more research is needed”. After more than 3,000 trials, we should recognise that the need for more trials is dubious…

Conclusion

Acupuncture has been studied for decades and the evidence that it can provide clinical benefits continues to be weak and inconsistent. There is no longer any justification for more studies. There is already enough evidence to confidently conclude that acupuncture doesn’t work. It is merely a theatrical placebo based on pre-scientific myths.   All health care providers who accept that they should base their treatments on scientific evidence whenever credible evidence is available, but who still include acupuncture as part of their health interventions, should seriously revise their practice.  There is no place for acupuncture in Medicine.