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Acupuncture reduces knee pain, but so does placebo

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Acupuncture is effective in relieving osteoarthritis knee pain, new research suggests, but placebo acupuncture appears to also do the job.

As reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, acupuncture was 53.1-percent successful in treating symptoms of knee osteoarthritis. However, a sham procedure that looked like acupuncture, but provided no actual benefit, was a close second with a success rate of 51.0 percent.

Still, the authors are reluctant to dismiss acupuncture as a treatment for knee osteoarthritis. The findings support a role for acupuncture as part of the treatment of "patients with pain and functional limitations due to osteoarthritis of the knee, even if the mechanisms of its effects remain unclear," they write. Acupuncture could add to the effects of more conservative therapy and reduce the need for pain medications.

The findings stem from a study of more than 1,000 patients who had pain due to osteoarthritis for at least six months. In addition to undergoing six physiotherapy sessions and receiving anti-inflammatory drugs as needed, the patients were randomly assigned to undergo 10 sessions of traditional Chinese acupuncture, 10 sessions of sham acupuncture, or 10 physician visits within a 6-week period. If the treatment was viewed as successful, the patient could receive five additional sessions or visits.

The sham acupuncture consisted of minimal depth needling at points away from recognized traditional Chinese acupuncture sites, lead author Dr. Hanns-Peter Scharf, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and colleagues note. Successful treatment was defined as a 36 percent or greater improvement in osteoarthritis index scores.

As noted, the two acupuncture treatments achieved success rates of around 52 percent each. By contrast, the success rate with conservative therapy was just 29.1 percent. Compared with conservative therapy, the two forms of acupuncture were roughly 74 percent more likely to be effective.

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