Acupuncture~ 5OOO yrs of practice, science slowly catching on

 Truly Effective Solution

Lisa Garber
Activist Post

Researchers examined over two dozen studies and determined that acupuncture effectively diminished chronic pain – news the pharmaceutical industry does not want to hear. The studies involved nearly 18,000 patients with back, neck, and shoulder pain, osteoarthritis, or chronic headaches, and showed that acupuncture for pain could be a simple solution.

“Many clinicians consider acupuncture to be merely a potent placebo and feel uncomfortable referring their patients to an acupuncturist,” says Andrew Vickers, a Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center researcher. “But our findings suggest that the effects of acupuncture go over and above the placebo effect.”

Acupuncture for Pain

In their findings, the researchers determined that, on a scale of 0 to 100, most patients arrived at an acupuncture session with pain at about level 60. Patients who received no acupuncture left the session with pain levels at about 43 while those who received “sham” treatments in which the needles were improperly placed left at level 35. Those who received proper acupuncture were at level 30.

The findings were published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine and contest the results of a 2009 study published in the British Medical Journal. The latter dismissed the effects obtained through acupuncture as a placebo effect.  ~Lissynote~ pRICKS    read on...