Sham acupuncture found to work as well as real thing

Sham acupuncture works just as well as the real thing, suggesting that 2,000 years of development of the ancient Chinese practice have counted for nothing.

Doctors who treated patients with migraine using acupuncture, involving the careful placement of needles at selected points on the skin, found that it was no more effective than sticking pins randomly into the skin.

The finding is a blow to practitioners of acupuncture who maintain there are 365 pressure points on the skin that must be stimulated for the therapy to have its healing effect. These tap into about a dozen energy channels or meridians on the body.

The study involved a group of 302 mostly female migraine patients in Germany.

Some were treated with real acupuncture over a period of eight weeks while others received the sham treatment consisting of needles placed into non-acupuncture points on the skin.

In both cases, about half the patients reported a reduction in the number of days they suffered headaches by at least 50 per cent.

In a control group who received no treatment, only 15 per cent experienced a similar reduction.

The scientists, led by Dr Klaus Linde, from the Centre for Complementary Medicine at Technische University in Munich, wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association: "In our trial, acupuncture was associated with a reduction of migraine headaches compared with no treatment.

However, the effects were similar to those observed with sham acupuncture and may be due to non-specific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."

Millions of Americans and Europeans turn to acupuncture when Western medicine falls short of their expectations. It has become the most popular form of complementary medicine, yet despite its ancient lineage and wealth of anecdotal support, there is little hard evidence to show that it works.

The largest study of acupuncture as a treatment for headache outside China was conducted in Britain and published in the British Medical Journal last year.

It involved 401 patients in 12 general practices and found acupunture reduced the number of days of headaches, the number of visits to the GP and the amount of medication.

The results were strong enough for researchers from the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, which co-ordinated the study, to urge the National Health Service to consider an immediate expansion of acupuncture services paid for by the taxpayer.

Hover, the BMJ noted that at least 26 earlier randomised trials of acupuncture for headache had been conducted but none had produced convincing evidence of the benefits.

If placing needles anywhere on the skin is just as effective, as suggested by the latest study, the case for offering acupuncture will be undermined.

There was a glimmer of hope for the therapy with the publication last week of a brain scan study of arthritis patients which suggested there may be more to acupuncture than merely a placebo effect.

Researchers at University College London and Southampton University reported finding differences in brain activity when volunteers were touched with blunt needles that did not pierce the skin, trick needles that retracted as they touched the skin, and real acupuncture.

The findings were reported in NeuroImage.

- INDEPENDENT