Acupuncture for chronic pain? Clinical wisdom undecided despite over 4000 years of practice.

While healers and practitioners have used acupuncture to relieve pain for millennia, modern clinical trials assessing the efficacy of this approach yield seemingly inconsistent and contradictory results. For example, in multiple rigorous studies focusing on chronic lower back pain, acupuncture outperformed standard-of-care (eg, combination of drugs, physical therapy, and exercise); surprisingly, sham acupuncture and placebo controls similarly outperformed conventional treatment. Zetetics sometimes discount this conundrum by dismissing the formidable psychosocial influence of both actual and sham acupuncture treatments. Moreover, the “alternative” appellation of acupuncture further fuels skepticism among health care providers, as does controversy shrouding the genesis and specificity of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. However, the effectiveness of acupuncture analgesia is more compelling than most clinicians appreciate. Recent findings demonstrate that acupuncture performs better than both placebos and other analgesic therapies. Thus, the judicious use of acupuncture affords a low-risk and evidence-based treatment option for chronic painean undervalued prospect to practitioners and consumers.