Acupuncture reduces pain and improves sleep for fibromyalgia patients. Researchers determined that “acupuncture is an effective form of treatment for individuals with fibromyalgia” in a meta-analysis of eleven studies. The investigators add that additional research can help to “enhance and extend the effective therapeutic use of acupuncture in the treatment of fibromyalgia.”
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© Jessica McDonald, 06/11/2014
Scientists have long puzzled over whether acupuncture relieves pain on its own or if it’s a case of the placebo effect.
In a new experiment from the University of Pennsylvania, acupuncture reduced pain by about 40 percent for a group of breast cancer patients, even for the women who did not believe it would work.
“To our surprise, we found actually in the real electro-acupuncture group, the expectation had no influence on outcome at all,” said study author Jun Mao, director of the Integrative Oncology Initiative at the Abramson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Patients performed equally well whether people believed in acupuncture or not.”
The curious finding, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs, could lead to a new way of prescribing the alternative medicine.
by Sara Adaes, PhD (c) | October 21, 2014
Acupuncture has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over 2,000 years. In the Western world, acupuncture has been a highly controversial therapy, mostly due to the lack of scientific explanations for its mechanisms of action. Nevertheless, acupuncture has become increasingly accepted, having spread worldwide and having become a frequently sought-after alternative therapy.
In 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Program recognized acupuncture as a therapeutic intervention of complementary medicine. The World Health Organisation (WHO) now recommends the use of acupuncture for treatment of numerous diseases and symptoms associated with cardiovascular, neurological, musculoskeletal, respiratory, gastrointestinal, gynaecological and psychological disorders.
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