Acupuncture to Help Chronic Pain

Stuart SchlossmanAlternative therapies and devices for Multiple Sclerosis (MS)

 By Cathy Cassata

Medically Reviewed by Justin Laube, MD

Acupuncture involves using thin needles to puncture the skin at specific points on the body. This technique is a practice used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has been around for thousands of years.

How It Works
Needles are placed on the skin to activate qi, which in TCM is considered the life force, the energy of the body that helps keep you well. In Western biomedical words, the points where the needles are placed are believed to activate the central nervous system to release chemicals throughout the body, or reduce this activity, that can help with healing.

In China, acupuncture is often used as a go-to treatment for everything from asthma to diabetes, but in the United States, it is more often used as a complementary treatment alongside other treatments or drugs for conditions like low back pain, joint pain, and headaches, and sometimes to help ease nausea and vomiting.

Chronic Pain Symptom Relief
In a meta-analysis of studies published in The Journal of Pain, researchers at the Acupuncture Trialists’ 


Collaboration found:

Acupuncture is effective for the treatment of chronic pain.


The effects of acupuncture persist over time.
The benefits of acupuncture cannot be explained solely by the placebo effect.
In a series of papers about chronic pain published in The Lancet, authors analyzed reviews of studies about chronic pain and treatment approaches. They included research that found mixed evidence regarding whether active acupuncture is more effective than sham acupuncture. Sham acupuncture is the research study approach used as a control acupuncture group; the skin isn’t penetrated, and instead, a device places pressure on the skin or needles are placed outside of the common points used for treatment.

 The researchers summarized the inherent challenges of performing truly controlled acupuncture studies and forming general conclusions about acupuncture’s effectiveness because of, for example, the high variety of unique characteristics in patients, the variety of types of acupuncture and point prescriptions, and the variety of durations of treatments used in clinical practice.

Researchers further reported in The Journal of Pain that for those with nonspecific musculoskeletal pain, osteoarthritis (OA), headache, or shoulder pain, acupuncture relieved pain compared with sham and no-acupuncture control groups. Additionally, they noted that treatment effects might persist up to a year. However, the researchers stated that the effect is highly dependent on the choice of control treatment

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