Seattle study: Acupuncture no help in chronic pain condition

PHILADELPHIA – Acupuncture proved no more effective than fake acupuncture treatment in treating a chronic pain condition, according to a study released Tuesday.

For 12 weeks, researchers tested acupuncture against three substitutes in the treatment of 100 Seattle-area patients for fibromyalgia, a condition characterized by chronic pain at various places in the head and torso.

The study concluded that adding acupuncture treatments to the other treatments the patients were already using provided no greater pain relief than the sham acupuncture treatments, according to the July 5 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

“We did not find that acupuncture reduced pain in patients with fibromyalgia,” the study concluded.

One of the researchers, Dr. Dedra Buchwald of the University of Washington, said the results were a surprise, given stories and testimonials from fibromyalgia patients who say they have been helped by acupuncture treatments.

“We’ve seen it ourselves in our patients, that they swear by it. They have a lot of faith that acupuncture works,” she said.

In the study, patients in all of the groups improved, but very early, after only one or two treatments – far earlier than most acupuncturists would expect an improvement – and then remained at the same level for the rest of the study, Buchwald said.

The results, she said, could mean either that any form of acupuncture results in some form of improvement, or that simply enrolling in the study and being hopeful about the outcome spurred an initial improvement in patients.

The other treatments – acupuncture for an unrelated condition, needle insertion at points that are not used in acupuncture, and simulated acupuncture that didn’t actually pierce the skin – were intended to help pinpoint what elements of acupuncture might be beneficial.

“No one really knows what the active component of acupuncture is,” she said. “The question we were asking is, ‘Is acupuncture beneficial (in treating fibromyalgia)?’ And we were also asking what part of it might be beneficial.”

Buchwald cautioned that acupuncturists generally tailor treatment for each individual patient and often combine it with other forms of treatment, which cannot be done within the confines of a clinical trial.

Acupuncture, she said, “certainly works in acute pain control, and it works in some conditions of chronic pain, so I don’t think this is to say that acupuncture doesn’t work at all.”

Adam Burke, an acupuncturist who treats patients with fibromyalgia and was not connected with the study, said the findings were not conclusive because, in part, the treatment that the study’s subjects received was not consistent with real-life alternative medicine therapy for fibromyalgia.

Typically, such treatment can consist of more than a year of acupuncture, along with complementary therapies like herbs and lifestyle changes, he said. Acupuncture involving electrical stimulation has been effective for fibromyalgia but that wasn’t looked at in the study, added Burke, an assistant professor of health education at San Francisco State University.

It’s also a newly recognized, poorly understood and highly complex phenomenon that still isn’t well understood or easily treated even by practitioners of Western medicine, he said.

Fibromyalgia, the second most common rheumatologic condition after osteoarthritis and affecting 2 to 4 percent of the U.S. population, is chronic and widespread pain and sensitivity to pressure at various points on the body. The cause of the condition is unknown, there are no laboratory tests for it, and no treatments have proven effective, the researchers said.

“There’s almost nothing that works for fibromyalgia. That’s one of the reasons we hoped (acupuncture) would work,” Buchwald said. “This is not that different from many other things that have been tried in which some patients got better and some didn’t.”