acupuncture
Auricular acupuncture (AA), according to the ‘COLLEGE OF AURICULAR ACUPUNCTURE’, has its origins in Modern Europe. In 1957 Dr. Paul Nogier, a neurologist from Lyons in France, observed a locum doctor treating sciatica by cauterizing an area of the ear. This prompted extensive research culminating in the development of the somatopic correspondence of specific parts of the body to the ear based upon the concept of an inverted foetus. Dr. Nogier believed that pain and other symptoms in the body could be alleviated by needling, massaging or electronically stimulating the corresponding region of the ear. Auricular Acupuncture is a specialized complementary therapy where acupuncture points on the outer ear are treated, using either needles or acupunctoscopes (electrical location and stimulation machines) to help relieve many chronic complaints. There are over 200 acupuncture points on the ear, each point named after an area of our anatomy. The outer ear acts like a switchboard to the brain. Each acupuncture point being treated, triggers electrical impulses from the ear via the brain, to the specific part of the body being treated.
Sounds odd? Well, that’s because it is odd!
But just because something is odd does not mean it is ineffective – so, what does the reliable evidence tell us? Here are some conclusions from systematic reviews:
The evidence that auricular acupuncture reduces postoperative pain is promising but not compelling.
The evidence for the effectiveness of AA for the symptomatic treatment of insomnia is limited.
The benefit of ear-acupressure for symptomatic relief of allergic rhinitis is unknown…
All of these analyses point out that the quality of the studies is usually very poor, and stress that more and better research is required. It is therefore interesting to note that a new study has just been published. Perhaps it could settle the question about the effectiveness of AA?
The aim of this study was 1) to evaluate whether auricular acupuncture effective for reducing health care provider stress and anxiety and 2) to determine, if auricular acupuncture impacts provider capacity for developing caring relationships with patients. Pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys were evaluated to see, if auricular acupuncture was associated with changes in State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Professional Quality of Life, and Caring Ability Inventory scores. The results indicate that, compared with baseline, participants had a significant reduction in state anxiety (STAI), trait anxiety (STAI), burnout, and secondary traumatic stress scores (Professional Quality of Life). Significant increases were noted in courage and patience, two dimensions of the Caring Ability Inventory.
From these findings, the authors conclude that auricular acupuncture is an effective intervention for the relief of stress/anxiety in providers and supports heightened capacity for caring.
Sounds odd again? Yes, because it is odd!
I would argue that a study of any controversial therapy that has already been tested repeatedly in poor quality trials must have sufficient scientific rigor to advance the field of inquiry. If it does not fulfil this criterion, it is quite simply not ethical. The new study does not even have a control group; we can therefore not begin to tell whether the observed outcomes were due to non-specific effects, the natural history of the condition or regression towards the mean (to mention but a few of the possible sources of bias). To conclude that AA is ‘an effective intervention’ is therefore utterly barmy.
All of this could be entirely trivial and inconsequential. I am afraid, however, that it is not. Alternative medicine is littered with such unethically flawed research conducted by naïve and clueless pseudo-scientists who arrive at outrageous conclusions. This relentless flow of false-positive findings misleads consumers, health care professionals, decision makers and everyone else to draw the wrong conclusions about bogus therapies. And, in the end, this sort of thing even does a grave disfavour to any branch of alternative medicine that might have some degree of respectability.
IT IS HIGH TIME THAT THIS NONSENSE STOPS! IT BORDERS ON SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT.
A new book is currently being promoted. It specifically targets cancer patients and misleads them into thinking that alternative therapies offer hope for this vulnerable group of patients. Here is what the press release says:
Endeavoring to provide the 1.2 million Americans diagnosed with cancer annually with alternative treatments co-authors Johanna C. Schipper and Frank J. Vanderlugt announce the launch of “The Natural Cancer Handbook”. The useful book explores how more than fifty alternative treatments work, their price, and where they can be obtained…. Contributing to the war on cancer with a bevy of scientific and anecdotal evidence to support the effectiveness of the treatments the handbook is a respite from the mixed messages patients often endure.
With more than fifty of the most effective alternative cancer treatments listed The Natural Cancer Handbook is the work of two years of research. Used successfully over the last century, the remedies found in the handbook are significantly cheaper than standard cancer treatments and in most cases can be used alongside them.
…The handbook discusses the successful alternative treatments Budwig Diet, Beta 1, 3D Glucan, and the readily available green food supplements such as barley grass, chlorella and spirulina. The Natural Cancer Handbook also explores the benefits of Melatonin, Noni, Resveratrol and the Canadian Resonant Light and the Hulda Clark generators.
…Vanderlugt is a Chartered Accountant with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Schipper has researched cancer extensively and has five years training in medicine.
Let’s just take the first treatment mentioned above; this is what a reliable source like CANCER RESEARCH UK have to say about it:
The Budwig diet was developed by a German biochemist called Johanna Budwig in the 1950s. It involves eating flaxseed mixed with cottage cheese or milk. Flax is a plant grown in many parts of the world. Pressing its seeds produces linseed oil to use in cooking or as a food supplement. The seeds contain high levels of fibre and many vitamins and minerals. You grind the flaxseed, usually in a coffee grinder. As well as flaxseed and cottage cheese, the Budwig diet is rich in fruit, vegetables and fibre. You also have to avoid sugar, meat, and fats such as butter, margarine and salad oil.
There is no reliable scientific evidence to show that the Budwig diet (or any highly specific diet) helps people with cancer. It is important to make sure that you have a well balanced diet when you are ill, especially if you are undernourished. We know from research that a healthy, well balanced diet can reduce the risk of cancer. You can find information about diet, healthy eating and cancer on our News and Resources website.
This is a polite way of telling us that diets such as this one is not balanced and not what cancer patients need; in fact, such diets are not just ineffective, they can be dangerous to cancer patients.
Texts like the Natural Cancer Handbook tend to make me quite angry. I find it deeply immoral to mislead cancer patients in this way, simply to make a profit. The truth could not be simpler: There is and never will be such a thing as an alternative cancer ‘cure’.
The concept assumes that there exists an effective cure which is being suppressed only because it originates from alternative medicine circles. But this assumption is idiotic. As soon as a treatment shows promise, it will be picked up by the scientific and oncologic communities and researched until its therapeutic value is known. At the end of this process, we might have a new option to treat cancer effectively. Many examples exist where a new drug was developed from a plant; taxol is but one of many examples.
Those who deny these simple facts in order to make a fast buck from the desperation of some of the most vulnerable patients are, in my view, charlatans of the worst kind.
Imagine an area of therapeutics where 100% of all findings of hypothesis-testing research is positive, i.e. comes to the conclusion that the treatment in question is effective. Theoretically, this could mean that the therapy is a miracle cure which is useful for every single condition in every single setting. But sadly, there are no miracle cures. Therefore something must be badly and worryingly amiss with the research in an area that generates 100% positive results.
Acupuncture is such an area; we and others have shown that Chinese trials of acupuncture hardly ever produce a negative finding. In other words, one does not need to read the paper, one already knows that it is positive – even more extreme: one does not need to conduct the study, one already knows the result before the research has started. But you might not believe my research nor that of others. We might be chauvinist bastards who want to discredit Chinese science. In this case, you might perhaps believe Chinese researchers.
In this systematic review, all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of acupuncture published in Chinese journals were identified by a team of Chinese scientists. A total of 840 RCTs were found, including 727 RCTs comparing acupuncture with conventional treatment, 51 RCTs with no treatment controls, and 62 RCTs with sham-acupuncture controls. Among theses 840 RCTs, 838 studies (99.8%) reported positive results from primary outcomes and two trials (0.2%) reported negative results. The percentages of RCTs concealment of the information on withdraws or sample size calculations were 43.7%, 5.9%, 4.9%, 9.9%, and 1.7% respectively.
The authors concluded that publication bias might be major issue in RCTs on acupuncture published in Chinese journals reported, which is related to high risk of bias. We suggest that all trials should be prospectively registered in international trial registry in future.
I applaud the authors’ courageous efforts to conduct this analysis, but I do not agree with their conclusion. The question why all Chinese acupuncture trials are positive has puzzled me since many years, and I have quizzed numerous Chinese colleagues why this might be so. The answer I received was uniformly that it would be very offensive for Chinese researchers to conceive a study that does not confirm the views held by their peers. In other words, acupuncture research in China is conducted to confirm the prior assumption that this treatment is effective. It seems obvious that this is an abuse of science which must cause confusion.
Whatever the reasons for the phenomenon, and we can only speculate about them, the fact has been independently confirmed several times and is now quite undeniable: acupuncture trials from China – and these constitute the majority of the evidence-base in this area – cannot be trusted. The only way to adequately deal with this problem that I can think of is to discard them outright.
An article in the ‘Huffpost Healthy Living’ recently discussed “the top three things that surprise people about acupuncture”. On closer inspection, they turn out to be the top three untruths about acupuncture. Here is (in italics and slightly abbreviated) what the article said.
Acupuncture is not just for pain
…It’s true that acupuncture can work wonders on pain conditions…However, acupuncture can alleviate a wide variety of ailments that have nothing to do with physical pain. Whether you have digestive issues, gynecological conditions, emotional concerns such as anxiety and depression, asthma, seasonal allergies, you name it, acupuncture can help address your symptoms.
Acupuncturists go to school for a long time
People tend to be unaware of the extent to which acupuncturists train to become licensed in their profession. Many assume becoming an acupuncturist is similar to becoming a massage therapist or Reiki practitioner or yoga instructor… At minimum, a licensed acupuncturist in the United States has been to three years of graduate school. Four years is more common. They hold master’s degrees. Some acupuncturists with doctorates have studied at the graduate level for five-plus years. Upon graduating from an accredited school, all acupuncturists must pass multiple board exams to become licensed in their state. In addition to the academic and state requirements for practicing acupuncture, many acupuncturists seek hands-on training and mentorship in the form of apprenticeships and continuing education seminars.
Acupuncture is relaxing
Acupuncture needles are surprisingly thin. They do not bear any resemblance to needles that are used for injections or to draw blood… In most cases, the insertion of acupuncture needles does not hurt…Once the needles are in, they start working their magic, which is where the relaxation part comes in. Acupuncture helps shift your body out of sympathetic mode (fight or flight) and into parasympathetic mode (rest and digest). It mellows out the nervous system, decreases muscular tension, and helps quiet internal chatter…
AND NOW THE FACTS:
1) There is not a single condition for which the evidence is truly compelling demonstrating that acupuncture is more than a placebo. Certainly there is no good evidence that acupuncture works for digestive issues, gynecological conditions, emotional concerns such as anxiety and depression, asthma or seasonal allergies.
2) In most countries, anyone can call themselves an acupuncturist, regardless of background or training.
3) The relaxing element of an acupuncture session is foremost the fact that patients lie down and have to keep still for 20 minutes or so. The insertion of needles does cause mild pain in many patients, and the claim about parasympathetic mode is mostly phantasy.
I despair about the nonsense that is published about alternative medicine on a daily basis – not because I have an axe to grind, but because it misleads patients into making wrong therapeutic decisions.
A recent meta-analysis evaluated the efficacy of acupuncture for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and arrived at bizarrely positive conclusions.
The authors state that they searched 4 electronic databases for double-blind, placebo-controlled trials investigating the efficacy of acupuncture in the management of IBS. Studies were screened for inclusion based on randomization, controls, and measurable outcomes reported.
Six RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and 5 articles were of high quality. The pooled relative risk for clinical improvement with acupuncture was 1.75 (95%CI: 1.24-2.46, P = 0.001). Using two different statistical approaches, the authors confirmed the efficacy of acupuncture for treating IBS and concluded that acupuncture exhibits clinically and statistically significant control of IBS symptoms.
As IBS is a common and often difficult to treat condition, this would be great news! But is it true? We do not need to look far to find the embarrassing mistakes and – dare I say it? – lies on which this result was constructed.
The largest RCT included in this meta-analysis was neither placebo-controlled nor double blind; it was a pragmatic trial with the infamous ‘A+B versus B’ design. Here is the key part of its methods section: 116 patients were offered 10 weekly individualised acupuncture sessions plus usual care, 117 patients continued with usual care alone. Intriguingly, this was the ONLY one of the 6 RCTs with a significantly positive result!
The second largest study (as well as all the other trials) showed that acupuncture was no better than sham treatments. Here is the key quote from this trial: there was no statistically significant difference between acupuncture and sham acupuncture.
So, let me re-write the conclusions of this meta-analysis without spin, lies or hype: These results of this meta-analysis seem to indicate that:
- currently there are several RCTs testing whether acupuncture is an effective therapy for IBS,
- all the RCTs that adequately control for placebo-effects show no effectiveness of acupuncture,
- the only RCT that yields a positive result does not make any attempt to control for placebo-effects,
- this suggests that acupuncture is a placebo,
- it also demonstrates how misleading studies with the infamous ‘A+B versus B’ design can be,
- finally, this meta-analysis seems to be a prime example of scientific misconduct with the aim of creating a positive result out of data which are, in fact, negative.
It is almost 10 years ago that Prof Kathy Sykes’ BBC series entitled ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE was aired. I had been hired by the BBC as their advisor for the programme and had tried my best to iron out the many mistakes that were about to be broadcast. But the scope for corrections turned out to be narrow and, at one stage, the errors seemed too serious and too far beyond repair to continue with my task. I had thus offered my resignation from this post. Fortunately this move led to some of my concerns being addressed after all, and they convinced me to remain in post.
The first part of the series was on acupuncture, and Kathy presented the opening scene of a young women undergoing open heart surgery with the aid of acupuncture. All the BBC had ever shown me and asked me to advise on was the text – I had never seen the images. Kathy’s text included the statement that the patient was having the surgery “with only needles to control the pain.” I had not objected to this statement in the firm belief that the images of the film would back up this extraordinary claim. As it turned out, it did not; the patient clearly had all sorts of other treatments given through intra-venous lines and, in the film, these were openly in the view of Kathy Sykes.
This overt contradiction annoyed not just me but several other people as well. One of them was Simon Singh who filed an official complaint against the BBC for misleading the public, and eventually won his case.
The notion that acupuncture can serve as an alternative to anaesthesia or other surgical conditions crops up with amazing regularity. It is important not least because is often used as a promotional tool with the implication that, IF ACUPUNCTURE CAN ACHIVE SUCH DRAMATIC EFFECTS, IT MUST BE AN INCREDIBLY USEFUL TREATMENT! It is therefore relevant to ask what the scientific evidence tells us about this issue.
This was the question we wanted to address in a recent publication. Specifically, our aim was to summarise recent systematic reviews of acupuncture for surgical conditions.
Thirteen electronic databases were searched for relevant reviews published since 2000. Data were extracted by two independent reviewers according to predefined criteria. Twelve systematic reviews met our inclusion criteria. They related to the prevention or treatment of post-operative nausea and vomiting as well as to surgical or post-operative pain. The reviews drew conclusions which were far from uniform; specifically for surgical pain the evidence was not convincing. We concluded that “the evidence is insufficient to suggest that acupuncture is an effective intervention in surgical settings.”
So, Kathy Sykes’ comment was misguided in more than just one way: firstly, the scene she described in the film did not support what she was saying; secondly, the scientific evidence fails to support the notion that acupuncture can be used as an alternative to analgesia during surgery.
This story has several positive outcomes all the same. After seeing the BBC programme, Simon Singh contacted me to learn my views on the matter. This prompted me to support his complaint against the BBC and helped him to win this case. Furthermore, it led to a co-operation and friendship which produced our book TRICK OR TREATMENT.
After a traumatic brain injury (TBI) the risk of stroke is significantly increased. Taiwanese researchers conducted a study to find out whether acupuncture can help to protect TBI patients from stroke. They used Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database to conduct a retrospective cohort study of 7409 TBI patients receiving acupuncture treatment and 29,636 propensity-score-matched TBI patients without acupuncture treatment as controls. Both TBI cohorts were followed for up to two years and adjusted for immortal time to measure the incidence and adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) of new-onset stroke.
TBI patients with acupuncture treatment (4.9 per 1000 person-years) had a lower incidence of stroke compared with those without acupuncture treatment (7.5 per 1000 person-years), with a HR of 0.59 (95% CI = 0.50-0.69) after adjustment for sociodemographics, coexisting medical conditions and medications. The association between acupuncture treatment and stroke risk was investigated by sex and age group (20-44, 45-64, and ≥65 years). The probability curve with log-rank test showed that TBI patients receiving acupuncture treatment had a lower probability of stroke than those without acupuncture treatment during the follow-up period (p<0.0001).
The authors conclude that patients with TBI receiving acupuncture treatment show decreased risk of stroke compared with those without acupuncture treatment. However, this study was limited by lack of information regarding lifestyles, biochemical profiles, TBI severity, and acupuncture points used in treatments.
I want to congratulate the authors for adding the last sentence to their conclusions. There is no plausible mechanism that I can think of by which acupuncture might bring about the observed effect. This does not mean that an effect does not exist; it means, however, that it is wise to be cautious and to not jump to conclusions which later need to be revised. The simplest interpretation, by far, of the observed phenomenon is that those patients opting to have acupuncture were, on average, less ill and therefore had a lower risk of stroke.
Having said that, the findings are, I think, intriguing enough to conduct further investigations – provided they are rigorous and eliminate the confounders that prevented this study from arriving at more definitive conclusions.
One of the questions I hear regularly is ‘HOW DO THE EFFECTS OF THIS ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT COMPARE TO THOSE OF CONVENTIONAL OPTIONS’? Take acupuncture in the management of osteoarthritis, for instance. There is some encouraging evidence suggesting it might help. The most recent systematic review that I know of concluded that “acupuncture provided significantly better relief from knee osteoarthritis pain and a larger improvement in function than sham acupuncture, standard care treatment, or waiting for further treatment.” However, in order to estimate its value in practice, we ought to know whether it is as good as or perhaps even better than standard treatments. In other words, what we really want to know is its relative effectiveness.
Data to evaluate the relative effectiveness of acupuncture or other alternative therapies are hard to come by. Ideally, one would require clinical trials which provide direct comparisons between the alternative and the conventional therapy. Sadly, such studies are scarce or even non-existent. Therefore we might have to rely on more indirect evidence. A new paper could be a step in the right direction.
The aim of this systematic review was to critically evaluate existing osteoarthritis (OA) management guidelines to better understand potential issues and barriers.
A systematic review of the literature in MEDLINE published from January 1, 2000 to April 1, 2013 was performed and supplemented by bibliographic reviews, following PRISMA guidelines and a written protocol. Following initial title and abstract screening, two authors independently reviewed full-text articles; a third settled disagreements. Two independent reviewers extracted data into a standardized form. Two authors independently assessed guideline quality; three generated summary recommendations based on the extracted guideline data.
Overall, 16 articles were included in the final review. There was broad agreement on recommendations by the various organizations. For non-pharmacologic modalities, education/self-management, exercise, weight loss if overweight, walking aids as indicated, and thermal modalities were widely recommended. For appropriate patients, joint replacement was recommended; arthroscopy with debridement was not recommended for symptomatic knee OA. Pharmacologic modalities most recommended included acetaminophen/paracetamol for first line treatment and oral or topical NSAIDs for second line therapy. Intra-articular corticosteroids were generally recommended for hip and knee OA. Controversy remains about the use of acupuncture, knee braces, heel wedges, intra-articular hyaluronans, and glucosamine/chondroitin.
I think that this tells us fairly clearly that, compared to other options, acupuncture is not considered to be an overwhelmingly effective treatment for osteoarthritis by those who understand that condition best. Several other therapies seem to be preferable because the evidence is clearer and stronger and their effect sizes is larger. This, I think begs the question whether it is in the best interest of patients or indeed ethical to ignore this knowledge and recommend acupuncture as a treatment of osteoarthritis.
More generally speaking, we should always bear in mind that it is not enough proving a therapy to be effective; we usually also need to consider what else is on offer. And if you think that this is rather complex, you are, of course, correct – but wait until someone mentions issues such as safety and cost of all the relevant therapeutic options.
Advocates of alternative medicine are incredibly fond of supporting their claims with anecdotes, or ‘case-reports’ as they are officially called. There is no question, case-reports can be informative and important, but we need to be aware of their limitations.
A recent case-report from the US might illustrated this nicely. It described a 65-year-old male patient who had had MS for 20 years when he decided to get treated with Chinese scalp acupuncture. The motor area, sensory area, foot motor and sensory area, balance area, hearing and dizziness area, and tremor area were stimulated once a week for 10 weeks, then once a month for 6 further sessions.
After the 16 treatments, the patient showed remarkable improvements. He was able to stand and walk without any problems. The numbness and tingling in his limbs did not bother him anymore. He had more energy and had not experienced incontinence of urine or dizziness after the first treatment. He was able to return to work full time. Now the patient has been in remission for 26 months.
The authors of this case-report conclude that Chinese scalp acupuncture can be a very effective treatment for patients with MS. Chinese scalp acupuncture holds the potential to expand treatment options for MS in both conventional and complementary or integrative therapies. It can not only relieve symptoms, increase the patient’s quality of life, and slow and reverse the progression of physical disability but also reduce the number of relapses and help patients.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with case-reports; on the contrary, they can provide extremely valuable pointers for further research. If they relate to adverse effects, they can give us crucial information about the risks associated with treatments. Nobody would ever argue that case-reports are useless, and that is why most medical journals regularly publish such papers. But they are valuable only, if one is aware of their limitations. Medicine finally started to make swift progress, ~150 years ago, when we gave up attributing undue importance to anecdotes, began to doubt established wisdom and started testing it scientifically.
Conclusions such as the ones drawn above are not just odd, they are misleading to the point of being dangerous. A reasonable conclusion might have been that this case of a MS-patient is interesting and should be followed-up through further observations. If these then seem to confirm the positive outcome, one might consider conducting a clinical trial. If this study proves to yield encouraging findings, one might eventually draw the conclusions which the present authors drew from their single case.
To jump at conclusions in the way the authors did, is neither justified nor responsible. It is unjustified because case-reports never lend themselves to such generalisations. And it is irresponsible because desperate patients, who often fail to understand the limitations of case-reports and tend to believe things that have been published in medical journals, might act on these words. This, in turn, would raise false hopes or might even lead to patients forfeiting those treatments that are evidence-based.
It is high time, I think, that proponents of alternative medicine give up their love-affair with anecdotes and join the rest of the health care professions in the 21st century.
There are numerous types and styles of acupuncture, and the discussion whether one is better than the other has been long, tedious and frustrating. Traditional acupuncturists, for instance, individualise their approach according to their findings of pulse and tongue diagnoses as well as other non-validated diagnostic criteria. Western acupuncturists, by contrast, tend to use formula or standardised treatments according to conventional diagnoses.
This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of standardized and individualized acupuncture treatment in patients with chronic low back pain. A single-center randomized controlled single-blind trial was performed in a general medical practice of a Chinese-born medical doctor trained in both western and Chinese medicine. One hundred and fifty outpatients with chronic low back pain were randomly allocated to two groups who received either standardized acupuncture or individualized acupuncture. 10 to 15 treatments based on individual symptoms were given with two treatments per week.
The main outcome measure was the area under the curve (AUC) summarizing eight weeks of daily rated pain severity measured with a visual analogue scale. No significant differences between groups were observed for the AUC (individualized acupuncture mean: 1768.7; standardized acupuncture 1482.9; group difference, 285.8).
The authors concluded that individualized acupuncture was not superior to standardized acupuncture for patients suffering from chronic pain.
But perhaps it matters whether the acupuncturist is thoroughly trained or has just picked up his/her skills during a weekend course? I am afraid not: this analysis of a total of 4,084 patients with chronic headache, lower back pain or arthritic pain treated by 1,838 acupuncturists suggested otherwise. There were no differences in success for patients treated by physicians passing through shorter (A diploma) or longer (B diploma) training courses in acupuncture.
But these are just one single trial and one post-hoc analysis of another study which, by definition, cannot be fully definitive. Fortunately, we have more evidence based on much larger numbers. This brand-new meta-analysis aimed to evaluate whether there are characteristics of acupuncture or acupuncturists that are associated with better or worse outcomes.
An existing dataset, developed by the Acupuncture Trialists’ Collaboration, included 29 trials of acupuncture for chronic pain with individual data involving 17,922 patients. The available data on characteristics of acupuncture included style of acupuncture, point prescription, location of needles, use of electrical stimulation and moxibustion, number, frequency and duration of sessions, number of needles used and acupuncturist experience. Random-effects meta-regression was used to test the effect of each characteristic on the main effect estimate of pain. Where sufficient patient-level data were available, patient-level analyses were conducted.
When comparing acupuncture to sham controls, there was little evidence that the effects of acupuncture on pain were modified by any of the acupuncture characteristics evaluated, including style of acupuncture, the number or placement of needles, the number, frequency or duration of sessions, patient-practitioner interactions and the experience of the acupuncturist. When comparing acupuncture to non-acupuncture controls, there was little evidence that these characteristics modified the effect of acupuncture, except better pain outcomes were observed when more needles were used and, from patient level analysis involving a sub-set of 5 trials, when a higher number of acupuncture treatment sessions were provided.
The authors of this meta-analysis concluded that there was little evidence that different characteristics of acupuncture or acupuncturists modified the effect of treatment on pain outcomes. Increased number of needles and more sessions appear to be associated with better outcomes when comparing acupuncture to non-acupuncture controls, suggesting that dose is important. Potential confounders include differences in control group and sample size between trials. Trials to evaluate potentially small differences in outcome associated with different acupuncture characteristics are likely to require large sample sizes.
My reading of these collective findings is that it does not matter which type of acupuncture you use nor who uses it; the clinical effects are similar regardless of the most obvious potential determinants. Hardly surprising! In fact, one would expect such results, if one considered that acupuncture is a placebo-treatment.
