Stick it to Your Headache
Reported January 26, 2009
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — New research shows the cure to your next headache could come from a needle not a pill!
Researchers found patients with headaches who were treated with acupuncture therapy suffered fewer headaches compared to those who used painkillers. Among migraine sufferers, acupuncture was also found to be superior to drug treatments. However, when these patients were given fake acupuncture treatments, they yielded the same positive results, raising questions among researchers.
“Much of the clinical benefit of acupuncture might be due to non-specific needling effects and powerful placebo effects, meaning selection of specific needle points may be less important than many practitioners have traditionally argued,” lead researcher Klaus Linde, with the Centre for Complementary Medicine Research at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, was quoted as saying.
Dr. Linde says more research is still needed to truly understand the effects of acupuncture before widely prescribing it to patients.
“Doctors need to know how long improvements associated with acupuncture will last and whether better trained acupuncturists really achieve better results than those with basic training only,” Dr. Linde said.
SOURCE: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, published online January 21, 2009
