Acupuncture - best therapy for back pain

I learned from a mailing list that there was a large number of queries about a trial published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, September 2007.

It was a randomized and blinded trial conducted across 340 practices in Germany involving 1162 adults who had suffered from lower back pain for an average of 8 years. Patients were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: verum acupuncture, sham acupuncture or conventional therapy. After 6 months, nearly half of the patients receiving acupuncture treatment showed significant improvements in back pain compared to about one-quarter receiving conventional treatment.


The finding has led to acupuncture being adopted in Germany as a covered benefit for chronic lower back pain treatment under statutory health insurance plans.

Source: "German Acupuncture Trials (GERAC) for Chronic Low Back Pain - Randomized, Multicenter, Blinded, Parallel-Group Trial With 3 Groups , Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:1892-1898 (Sept 27)

Read previous post on "Alternative medicine in the US medical curriculm" and the cut back on using complementary therapies in the UK.

Alternative medicine in US medical curriculum

Washington Post reported in a post "Earning a spot in the curriculum" that a consortium of 38 medical schools including the major ones Harvard, Stanford and Duke is working to integrate complementary and alternative (CAM) into mainstream medical curricula.

Medical students are being taught to ask about the use of CAM tretaments when they take patient history to guard against potential interferance between conventional practices and medicines. Students are encouraged to respect patients' cultural and ethnic backgrounds which may include CAM practices. The most widely embraced therapy is acupuncture.

In the UK, many primary care trusts (PCTs) have refused to pay for homoeopathy and cancelled their contracts after some leading doctors have urged NHS trusts to stop using complementary therapies and to fund only therapies that were backed up by scientific evidence. Read the doctors' open letter to the PCTs.