Needles reduce knee pain, but not neck pain
By Kathleen Fackelmann
USA Today
The ancient Chinese art of acupuncture offered people with arthritis of the knee significant pain relief, but it didn't seem to help people with chronic neck pain, two scientific studies conclude.
Acupuncture, the practice of inserting needles into specific body points, has been practiced for some 2,000 years by the Chinese. But it has never been fully accepted or studied by U.S. physicians or scientists.
The results of this knee study, the largest of its kind, are likely to push doctors and patients to seriously consider this treatment along with standard therapies, says Stephen Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the study.
Straus says that the knee study's results will offer patients with arthritis of the knee another option to relieve pain, a particularly important finding for patients now that Vioxx has been pulled from the market for safety reasons and a key rival, Celebrex, has been linked to heart attacks and strokes.
More than 20 million people in the United States suffer from osteoarthritis, a degenerative and often crippling disease of the joints. The condition is caused by wear and tear on the cartilage, the tissue that cushions the body's joints. The cartilage starts to break down, which often causes excruciating pain.
Brian Berman at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and his colleagues took 190 people who suffered from osteoarthritis of the knee and treated them with acupuncture. They compared that group with 191 people who got sham acupuncture, the use of fake needles that didn't pierce the skin.
People getting genuine acupuncture got a 40 percent decrease in pain and a 40 percent improvement in knee function.
A second study, also reported in the Dec. 21 Annals of Internal Medicine, indicates that acupuncture didn't help people with chronic neck pain, which can also be caused by arthritis, says John Klippel, president of the Arthritis Foundation.
