Studies of Successful Treatments

A friend of mine gave me a cartoon that perhaps you saw in the local newspaper. It pictured a wooly mammoth with spears in its backside thrown in by tiny cave men. The caption read Early Acupuncture. My wife hands me the June 2nd issue of Business Week with an article entitled Alternative Medicine: Not So Alternative Any More. Finally, laying on my desk this morning was a copy of Boston Business Journal whose front page story is entitled The Healing Ways, depicting, what else, complementary medicine. Even the die hard skeptics are starting to look at these forms of therapies, because the studies are beginning to come back highly favorable. In Acupuncture Efficacy: A Compendium of Controlled Clinical Studies, written by Stephen Finch and Richard Hammerschlag, acupuncture has been shown to be effective in a wide variety of clinical cases.

Many of you who have told your friends how acupuncture has helped or eliminated your migraines can now tout the Loh L, Schott, and Zilkha Study which shows that acupuncture can produce better relief than standard drug therapy in patients with long-term histories of chronic headaches. Also, the Alonen, Makumaki, Partanen, Riekkinen, and Sivenius study which concluded that four acupuncture sessions produced the same levels of improvement in tension headaches as eight sessions of physiotherapy. This suggests that acupuncture is not only as treatment-effective as a more conventional treatment, but is more cost-effective as well.

Outlined in this book are conditions that we all commonly associate with successfully being able to treat with acupuncture such as low-back pain, tennis elbow, osteoarthritis, dysmenorrhea (painful menses), post-operative pain, and sports injuries. The Hansen Study of chronic facial pain, which is usually difficult to treat by traditional means, can respond to acupuncture treatment and the improvement is greater than that resulting from a placebo effect. Acupuncture therapy has also been shown to be effective in chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, morning sickness, respiratory diseases (such as asthma), peripheral nerve injury, and stroke.

These studies confirm what I've seen clinically and what you have experienced in your treatments here. It's also important to know that acupuncture is a viable alternative to try instead of a procedure which may be unwanted by you and your physician. They point out studies where acupuncture was used in conjunction with other conventional treatments which resulted in better medical results and greater patient satisfaction.