Chronic Pain Responds to Acupuncture, Says Major Study

An enormous and well designed National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study concluded that acupuncture definitively worked to successfully treat pain in a variety of conditions ranging from migraines, chronic back pain, shoulder pain as well as various types of arthritis.

According to the New York Times,

The findings provide strong scientific support for an age-old therapy used by an estimated three million Americans each year. 

“This has been a controversial subject for a long time,” said Dr. Andrew J. Vickers, attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the lead author of the study. “But when you try to answer the question the right way, as we did, you get very clear answers.

“We think there’s firm evidence supporting acupuncture for the treatment of chronic pain.”“This has been a controversial subject for a long time,” said Dr. Andrew J. Vickers, attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the lead author of the study. “But when you try to answer the question the right way, as we did, you get very clear answers. 

The study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and which can be read here, does not surprise those of us who treat chronic pain every day. However, it is deeply satisfying to witness such mainstays of western medical research find such benefits and tout them so widely.