Just a few weeks ago, a person popped his head in my office and asked- “ Does acupuncture really work?” I honestly wanted to respond with a snappy remark such as “obviously it does or I would be out of a job” but I refrained and kindly responded Yes. Well, CNN Health and The Atlantic both picked up a big, new study done at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center that reports on acupuncture’s effectiveness. In a meta-analysis of 18,000 patients from 29 studies, acupuncture was found to be successful in relieving back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, chronic headache and shoulder pain. This new study has been getting lots of press- major newspapers and network television.
This study is big, it reviews randomized controlled studies and the reports are consistently good. The results “provide the most robust evidence to date that acupuncture is a reasonable referral option,” wrote the authors. The authors explained their statistical findings by using a pain scale of 0 to 100: The patients’ average baseline pain measured 60; it dropped to 30 on average in those who got acupuncture. That translates into a 50% reduction in pain!! I’ll take it!