More evidence to show that acupuncture is a placebo treatment

The authors of this review start their paper with the following statement:

Acupuncture has demonstrated effectiveness for symptom management among breast cancer survivors.

This, I think, begs the following question: if they already know that, why do they conduct a systematic review of the subject?

The answer becomes clear as we read thier article: they want to add another paper to the literature that shows they are correct in their assumption.

So, they do the searches and found 26 trials (2055 patients), of which 20 (1709 patients) could be included in the meta-analysis. Unsurprisingly, their results show that acupuncture was more effective than control groups in improving pain intensity [standardized mean difference (SMD) = -0.60, 95% confidence intervals (CI) -1.06 to -0.15], fatigue [SMD = -0.62, 95% CI -1.03 to -0.20], and hot flash severity [SMD = -0.52, 95% CI -0.82 to -0.22].  Compared with waitlist control and usual care groups, the acupuncture groups showed significant reductions in pain intensity, fatigue, depression, hot flash severity, and neuropathy. No serious adverse events were reported related to acupuncture intervention. Mild adverse events (i.e., bruising, pain, swelling, skin infection, hematoma, headache, menstrual bleeding) were reported in 11 studies.

The authors concluded that this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that acupuncture significantly reduces multiple treatment-related symptoms compared with the usual care or waitlist control group among breast cancer survivors. The safety of acupuncture was inadequately reported in the included studies. Based on the available data, acupuncture seems to be generally a safe treatment with some mild adverse events. These findings provide evidence-based recommendations for incorporating acupuncture into clinical breast cancer symptom management. Due to the high risk of bias and blinding issues in some RCTs, more rigorous trials are needed to confirm the efficacy of acupuncture in reducing multiple treatment-related symptoms among breast cancer survivors.

Yes, I agree: this is an uncritical white-wash of the evidence. So, why do I bother to discuss this paper? After all, the acupuncture literature is littered with such nonsense.

Well, to my surprise, the results did contain a little gem after all.

A subgroup analysis of the data indicated that acupuncture showed no significant effects on any of the treatment-related symptoms compared with the sham acupuncture groups.

In other words, this paper confirms what has been discussed repeatedly on this blog (see for instance here, here, and here):

Acupuncture seems to be a placebo therapy!