Heaven & Earth Acupuncture and Wellness » low back pain

Acupuncture Good For Lower Back Pain – Ulster Research

Kyle Smith — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:25:00 +0000

A pilot study suggests that the treatment, when combined with exercise, is good for pain in the lower back.
Auricular acupuncture also appears to have a wider good-health impact on patients.

Details were presented to the prestigious North American Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine by Professor Suzanne McDonough, Dr Siobhan McCann and Ms Ruth Hunter from the Schools of Health Sciences and Psychology at Ulster.

They said small acupuncture needles in the ear are potentially a very cost effective and innovative approach that could be easily combined with other treatments such as exercise.

Professor McDonough said: “The main findings from this study are that a combined approach – acupuncture and supervised exercise classes – improves the management of low back pain more than exercise classes alone.

“These results are very timely, given the recent publication of National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines.

“NICE is recommending a course of acupuncture or supervised exercise classes (as tested in the Ulster trial) for people with low back pain. However, more work needs to be done on how these treatments might be combined in large scale studies in an NHS setting.”

Dr McCann said the results produced evidence of well-being effects generally.

“The participants reported that the programme had a range of psychological as well as physical benefits and the treatment had, for many, a huge impact on their quality of life.”

The conference organisers received more than 1,000 research submissions. Of those selected for delivery, just 12% came from outside North America.

In their presentations, Professor McDonough and Miss Ruth Hunter, who is a PhD student, discussed how the project was developed and its key research findings, while Dr Siobhan McCann focused on the participants’ experiences of receiving acupuncture and exercise.

Auricular acupuncture is commonly used in the treatment of people with substance misuse to reduce cravings and other withdrawal symptoms. A recent and largely untested development has been the use of needles in the ear for treating painful conditions.

It is considered a microsystem of acupuncture and was developed in France after World War II by Dr Paul Nogier, who proposed that a relationship exists between different anatomic areas of the body and specific points on the ear.

The preliminary research study, which is part of an ongoing research programme at Ulster, was funded by the Public Health Agency for Northern Ireland through its Research and Development Office

Acupuncture, Real of Fake, helps aching back: Study

Kyle Smith — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:05:51 +0000

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Acupuncture brought more relief to people with back pain than standard treatments, whether it was done with a toothpick or a real needle, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that raises new questions about how acupuncture works.
For many patients, that benefit lasted for a year, the team reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“Our study shows that you don’t need to stick needles into people to get the same effect,” said Dr. Daniel Cherkin of Group Health Center for Health Studies in Seattle, who led the study.
“Historically, some types of acupuncture have used non-penetrating needles. Such treatments may involve physiological effects that make a clinical difference,” Karen Sherman of Group Health, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
The team, wanted to study the effects of different types of acupuncture in a large, carefully controlled study of 638 patients with chronic low back pain.
They divided patients into several groups. One got seven weeks of standardized acupuncture treatment known to be effective in back pain. Another group got an individually prescribed acupuncture treatment.
A third group was treated using a toothpick in a needle guide tube that did not pierce the skin as regular acupuncture does, but targeting the correct acupuncture “points”.
A fourth group just got standard medical treatment, which included medication and physical therapy.
After eight weeks, 60 percent of the patients who got any type of acupuncture reported significant improvement in their ability to function compared with those who got standard medical care alone.
But there was no significant difference in the pain relief people got from the acupuncture using needles or from toothpicks.
The researchers said there is some evidence that even needles were used 2,000 years ago in acupuncture treatment, and some imaging studies have shown that “superficial and deep needling of an acupuncture point elicited similar blood oxygen level-dependent responses,” the team wrote.
Another study even found that lightly touching the skin can induce some emotional and hormonal reactions, which could explain the benefit, they wrote.
Or, it may simply be the experience of visiting an acupuncturist for treatments that helps.
Regardless of how it worked, they said acupuncture appears to be a relatively safe and painless way of easing an aching back, especially when traditional medicine alone fails.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Maggie Fox and Cynthia Osterman)