Acupuncture helps supply more energy and increase sex drive

There is little dispute that people feel better after receiving acupuncture. But are they benefiting from the procedure, or just getting a placebo effect?

A study published in August in the journal Arthritis Care and Research found that among 455 patients with painful knee arthritis, acupuncture, in which thin needles are inserted deeply into the skin at specific points on the body, delivered no more relief than a sham treatment.

Actually, patients got significant pain relief from both treatments. And critics contend that the study, performed by Researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was poorly designed.

They noted that patients in both groups received treatment with needles and electrical stimulation, but in the sham group, the needles were not inserted as deeply and the stimulation was far shorter in duration.

Rather than proving that acupuncture does not work, the study may suggest that it works even when administered poorly. But he real lesson, acupuncture supporters say, is how difficult it can be to apply Western standards to an ancient healing art. Click to learn Abnormal Uterine Bleeding in TCM.

"People argue that there really are no inactive acupuncture points - pretty much wherever you put a needle in the body is an active point," said Dr. AlexMoroz, an acupuncturist who directs the musculoskeletal rehabilitation program at New York University."There is a body of literature that argues that the whole approach to studying acupuncture doesn't lend itself to the Western reductionist scientific method."

But the study's lead author, Dr. Maria E. Suarez-Almazor, notes that the sham treatment was developed with the help of trained acupuncturists. "We didn't plan a study trying to show that acupuncture didn't work," said Dr. Suarez-Almazor."The results came out with no difference between the groups."

The research and other recent acupuncture studies have fueled speculation that the prick of a needle, whether from real or sham acupuncture, can influence the way the body processes and transmits pain signals.

A 2007 German study of 1,200 back-pain patients showed that about half the patients in both real and sham acupuncture groups had less pain after treatment, compared with only 27 percent of those receiving traditional back care.

Only 15 percent of patients in the acupuncture group required extra pain drugs, compared with 34 percent in the sham group. The group receiving conventional back therapy fared even worse: 59 percent needed extra pain pills.

The researchers speculated that inserting needles may have caused a "super placebo" effect, touching off a series of reactions that changed the way the body experienced pain.

This year, researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, instead of creating a sham acupuncture treatment, compared acupuncture to the drug Effexor, an antidepressant that has been shown to significantly reduce hot flashes in breast cancer patients. Click to learn Primary Infertility in TCM.

The results were striking. Acupuncture relieved hot flashes just as well as Effexor, with fewer side effects. The acupuncture recipients reported more energy and even an increased sex drive.

"There are some things you can't study the same way we do with drugs," said Dr. Eleanor M. Walker, director of breast radiation oncology at the Henry Ford Health System. "The thing that can't be argued in my study is the duration of the effect. It lasts, and the placebo effect doesn't last once you stop a treatment."

But acupuncture believers say it doesn't really matter whether studies find that the treatment has a strong placebo effect. After all, the goal of what they call integrative medicine, which combines conventional and alternative treatments like acupuncture, is to harness the body's power to heal itself, whether that power is stimulated by a placebo effect or by skillful placement of needles.

"In general in integrative medicine, when patients are involved in their healing process, they have a tendency to do better," said Angela Johnson, a practitioner of Chinese medicine at Rush Children's Hospital in Chicago who is conducting a pilot study of acupuncture to relieve pain in children. "I believe that's part of the reason why they get better."

Article source: Chinadaily