According to a report issued by the British Medical Journal, acupuncture and sham acupuncture are effective in reducing rates of tension headaches in subjects who normally suffer from them.
In a classic randomised controlled trial - the gold standard of clinical trials - researchers in Germany divided 270 patients with a similar severity of tension headache into three groups.
Over an eight week period one set were treated with traditional acupuncture, one with minimal acupuncture (needles inserted only superficially into the skin, at non-acupuncture points), and one group had neither treatment ('control' group).
Those receiving traditional acupuncture care saw their headache rates drop by almost half - suffering 7 fewer days of headaches over the four weeks following the treatment. Those receiving minimal acupuncture had 6.6 fewer days of headaches. While the control group experienced 1.5 less days of headaches - a drop of just a tenth.
Improvements to headache rates continued for months after the acupuncture treatment, though they began to rise slightly as time went on.
Those in the "no treatment" group were subsequently given acupuncture for eight weeks after the main study period. These patients also improved significantly after the treatment, though not to the same level as those given acupuncture initially.
Of the 195 patients in the acupuncture groups, 37 reported some side effects - the most common being dizziness, other headaches and bruising.
Such a small difference in results between traditional and minimal acupuncture treatments seems to indicate that the location of acupuncture points and other aspects of traditional Chinese acupuncture do not make a major difference for tension headache, said the authors.
Acupuncture treatments are sometimes associated with strong placebo effects, caution the authors. But these findings show that acupuncture produces just as good improvements for tension headache sufferers as treatments already accepted, they conclude.
This is similar to results obtained in a similarly-designed study to assess the effects of acupuncture, sham acupuncture, and no treatment on incidence of the more severe migraine headaches in 307 German sufferers, reported earlier in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The researchers found that between baseline and weeks 9 to 12, the average number of days with headache of moderate or severe intensity decreased 3.0 days from a baseline of 5.2 days in the acupuncture group compared with a decrease to 2.2 days from a baseline of 5.0 days in the sham acupuncture group, and by 0.8 days from a baseline of 5.4 days in the control group. No difference was detected between the acupuncture and the sham acupuncture groups while there was a difference between the acupuncture group compared with the control group (1.4 days). The proportion of responders (reduction in headache days by at least 50 percent) was 51 percent in the acupuncture group, 53 percent in the sham acupuncture group, and 15 percent in the waiting list group.
The researchers concluded that acupuncture was associated with a reduction of migraine headaches compared with no treatment; however, the effects were similar to those observed with sham acupuncture and might be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both.
References:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050731232901.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050504101520.htm
* * *
You are welcome to print and circulate all articles published on Clearharmony and their content, but please quote the source.
more ...