Getting acupuncture does not replace seeing a healthcare provider about a medical issue. Instead, you might check with your provider first to help answer any questions about complementary health approaches for back pain, like acupuncture. Acupuncturists sometimes use electroacupuncture, which involves running small amounts of electricity through the needles. This can make the treatment more effective and is especially helpful for pain relief. From there, you’ll sit or lie down before the practitioner carefully inserts very thin needles underneath the surface of the skin, targeting specific acupuncture points. acupuncture for pain relief It’s possible to feel a tingling or dull aching sensation in those areas, but you shouldn’t feel any noticeable or significant pain.
A service of the National Library of Medicine, PubMed® contains publication information and (in most cases) brief summaries of articles from scientific and medical journals. For guidance from NCCIH on using PubMed, see How To Find Information About Complementary Health Practices on PubMed. In the United States, data from the National Health Interview Survey show that the use of acupuncture by U.S. adults more than doubled between 2002 and 2022.
Acupuncture is an effective method for pain relief, targeting both acute and chronic pain.
We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with your health care provider. The mention of any product, service, or therapy is not an endorsement by NCCIH. NCCIH and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide tools to help you understand the basics and terminology of scientific research so you can make well-informed decisions about your health. Know the Science features a variety of materials, including interactive modules, quizzes, and videos, as well as links to informative content from Federal resources designed to help consumers make sense of health information.
Acupuncture for Pain Relief
- Most clinical trials focused on analgesic effects after multiple acupuncture treatment.
- Acupuncture has been used to treat most pain conditions, including low back pain, shingles and other nerve pain, hand and knee pain, headaches, fibromyalgia, and menstrual pain.
- This study showed that real acupuncture was superior to both sham acupuncture and nonacupuncture controls, though the difference between real and sham acupuncture was small30.
- The RCTs included in this review used either the VAS or NRS to measure pain outcomes.
- During an acupuncture session, fine needles are gently inserted into specific points on your body.
They’ll look at your symptoms, medical history, and overall health to help determine if acupuncture is right for you. Instead, Kempisty recommends “Tai Chi, yoga, and meditation and learning simple self-massage techniques to promote the flow of energy into your aroma and different parts of your body,” if you’re looking for ways to gain similar benefits at home. The actual treatment portion of acupuncture may last around 30 to 40 minutes.
Limitations of the key studies or references employed
Acupuncture has been well-studied for treating headache pain, including migraine headaches and tension headaches. Two of the authors (AX and KC) independently graded the overall quality of the evidence for each outcome using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) classification 51. If you have a condition that causes painful joints, you may have thought about trying acupuncture. Conceptualization, C.A.P. and M.I.J.; methodology, C.A.P.; formal analysis, C.A.P. and M.I.J.; writing—Original draft preparation, C.A.P.; writing—Review and editing, C.A.P. and M.I.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Dry needling vs. acupuncture – what’s the difference?
- Controls that involve inserting needles into the skin at non-acupuncture points can be used to determine the influence of needling discrete points of the skin on outcome.
- At each session, the acupuncturist will put very thin needles into various places in your skin.
- The meta-analytic effect sizes were not similar across pain conditions.
- One study found that acupuncture helped reduce pain, swelling, redness, and stiffness in all patients in the study group.
This pattern supports the notion that acupuncture treatment has a notable placebo response, or meaning response, that may be responsible for much of its demonstrated benefits. For certain patients, especially those who are unresponsive or intolerant to standard therapies, acupuncture is a reasonable treatment option. Physiological effects in response to acupuncture have been widely noted in humans, both at the site of the needle and further away.
Treatment-Related Nausea and Vomiting in Cancer Patients
Non-Cochrane SRs published in 2013 (16 RCTs 130) and 2014 (9 RCTs 129) were inconclusive. In 2019, two SRs have produced evidence that acupuncture was superior to sham but the evidence status was downgraded due to high levels of heterogeneity and inadequate sample sizes (10 RCTs 128; 12 RCT 127). Acupuncture is an age-old technique which became part of modern medicine in the 1970s. In modern medicine, traditional forms of acupuncture, based on the ancient Chinese concept of qi and meridians, have been superseded by acupuncture based on a neurophysiological model 5,6. The unique identity of acupuncture lies in the process of inserting needles (‘acu’) in the skin (‘puncture’), although a modern definition should include the need to do this at specific points in accordance with known physiological or anatomical rationale 7.
Acupuncture can be used to navigate various psychological disorders and physical discomforts. Here is a list of when acupuncture for pain relief is mainly applied. Besides traditional acupuncture with needles, this treatment is also performed with additional electrodes attached to needles, known as electroacupuncture. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the human body consists of around two thousand acupuncture points, each related to specific bodily functions and systems. The trained professional, otherwise known as an acupuncturist, places the needles on these points to promote balance in the body.
Importantly, acupuncture does not just manage pain symptoms but may target the sources that drive pain, such as inflammation, partially by modulating autonomic pathways. Contextual factors are important for acupuncture analgesia, which is a complex multifaceted intervention. In clinical practice, historical records and many providers believe that acupuncture efficacy depends on specific acupoints used, the technique of needle placement and stimulation, and the person who delivers the procedure. Clinical research has supported the safety and effectiveness of acupuncture for various pain disorders, including acupuncture as a complementary/integrative therapy with other pain interventions. It has been argued that enriched enrolment with randomised withdrawal (EERW) study designs are of value for treatments influencing symptoms but not necessarily the course of the underlying disease or pathology, as is the case for acupuncture in the management of chronic pain 224. The potential for using such designs in the assessment of pharmacological agents has been recognised 225, although EERW designs are rarely used to assess non-pharmacological interventions.
Create a file for external citation management software
Presently, NICE only recommends acupuncture as a prophylactic treatment for chronic tension-type headache and migraine 12,13. We finally evaluated a total of 13 studies including a total of 1,077 participants with a mean age of 32 years (range, 20–78 years). For all of the eligible RCTs, the participants were required to have been diagnosed with disease-related pain for eligibility. Of the 13 RCTs, 4 investigated LBP 31, 32, 38, 40, and the remaining 9 investigated neck pain 35, neck and shoulder pain 37, carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) 36, knee osteoarthritis 34, fibromyalgia 39, dysmenorrhea 33, sore throat 41, renal colic 30, and migraine 42.
“We are not animals who are dependent on drugs.”If you’re deciding if acupuncture is right for you, it’s best to be open to its benefits and skeptical of claims it’s a magical cure-all. “It should be part of a comprehensive approach to solve problems,” Hui says. Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to lessen digestion problems…keep inflammation under control…learn simple exercises to improve your balance…understand your options for cataract treatment…all delivered to your email box FREE.