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FlyBy is sorry. This is wrong. But we wasted three hours on it, and we want you to feel our pain...
More surprising was the fact that all three acupuncture services, including the sham version with toothpicks, had about the same effect on pain reduction. It's worth remembering that the toothpicks were used at the same points involved in the standard acupuncture treatment - that is, practitioners were not pricking their patients at random. A year after the treatments, all of the acupuncture patients reported an average 63% improvement in pain relief, while half of the untreated patients reported feeling better. "Everyone agrees that acupuncture is having some physiological effect. But we still don't understand how it might be working...
...findings raise at least two possible explanations. Since the sham procedure used the same acupuncture points as the legitimate therapy, there may be something about the stimulation of those points, even without skin penetration, that triggers a beneficial physiological reaction in the body and the nervous system, leading to pain relief. (This may be the mechanism behind acupressure, which involves pressing certain points on the body to alter physiological processes occurring deep inside organs.) Or the patients' improvement may be due simply to a powerful placebo effect, in which the mere belief that you are receiving a new pain-relieving...
Since most back patients seek help when they're experiencing extreme pain, fast-acting acupuncture may be a reasonable option for them. A year ago, experts at the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society sanctioned it when they included acupuncture in their recommended treatments for back-pain sufferers. "This study is consistent with those recommendations that if pain relievers aren't helping you, then acupuncture is a reasonable choice," says Nahin...
...physician is quite ready to recommend pricking yourself with toothpicks. "Further studies are going to have to tease out the relative magnitude of the placebo effect from the physiological effects of acupuncture," says Nahin. "But for patients, what the study tells you is that if you are having pain that is not being well managed by standard care, then acupuncture is a viable option...