Two recent studies found acupuncture to be twice as effective as conventional care for treating chronic low back pain. Acupuncture is also known to be much safer especially considering that chronic low back pain is a leading reason people take opioid pain medications. Abuse of those medications is now the leading cause of accidental adult deaths in the U.S. In this video, we address a problem that has been holding acupuncture back from being more accepted and that is the lack of understanding about exactly how it works. The studies referenced here found that putting acupuncture needles in spots not normally used for low back pain and also tapping acupuncture points with toothpicks to simulate acupuncture worked almost as well as the “real” acupuncture points and even this was twice as effective as conventional care! Findings like these cause the small but determined group of acupuncture critics out there to proclaim acupuncture is only a placebo and so should not be used. Acupuncture is most certainly not placebo as its effective use in Veterinary medicine clearly shows. It is the position of the Acupuncture Now Foundation that acupuncture’s superior safety record, especially compared to dangerous pain medications, should take precedent over the inability to definitively explain exactly how acupuncture works. We are also working with leading researchers to show that most acupuncture studies are so poorly designed that the “real” acupuncture performs at a lower rate than seen in practice and that is the leading reason why it sometimes does not out-perform the “sham” acupuncture in some studies. If acupuncture is done to its best level, it would be closer to three times more effective than conventional care.

Here are links to the studies referenced in our videos:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17893311
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19433697

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