Acupuncture is twice as effective as conventional treatments in providing relief from lower back pain. So say German researcher Michael Haake, of the University of Regensburg and team, in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
But they discovered that fake acupuncture works almost as well.
In their randomized clinical trial the researchers observed 1,162 adults about 50 years old, who had been suffering from lower back pain for an average of eight years. They were divided into three treatment groups: those receiving verum or traditional acupuncture; those receiving sham acupuncture; and those receiving conventional therapy, which consisted of medication, physical therapy and exercise.
The first group consisting of three hundred and eighty seven of the participants underwent two 30-minute sessions of verum (true, Chinese) acupuncture each week, for ten sessions. In this particular type of acupuncture the pressure points on a patient's back and other parts of the body are pierced up to a depth of 4cm with about fourteen to twenty needles. The patient then goes through a numbed period referred to as Qi. They found that there was a lasting improvement of at least 33% in their functional ability.
The next three hundred and eighty seven participants went through ten sessions of 'pretense' acupuncture. The needles were inserted at random and not as deeply nor at the pressure points. Forty four percent of this group also experienced relief from their pain. This was a higher percentage than those undergoing conventional therapy and just a little lower than those who underwent the traditional type of acupuncture.
In the third group, the one that was being administered conventional drugs and underwent exercise therapy, a smaller percentage of 27 found relief.
In trying to explain the equally good results with untrue or real acupuncture, Haake remarked, "The superiority of both forms of acupuncture suggests a common underlying mechanism that may act on pain generation, transmission of pain signals, or processing of pain signals by the central nervous system and that is stronger than the action mechanism of conventional therapy."
The researchers had hoped to distinguish between the physical and the psychological effects of the two acupuncture techniques. If the traditional acupuncture worked had better than the 'placebo' one, it would have shown a genuine basis in physiology. But the trial did not find any differences at all. This caused the authors to conclude that there were two possibilities; either acupuncture has no physical effects at all, or they are so minute that psychological effects have a far stronger effect.
An orthopedic surgeon at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Rex Marco, M.D conjectured that the 'placebo' needling could have triggered endorphin release or other potentially therapeutic effects.
