Acupuncture for Lower Back Pain

I’ve been doing quite a lot of acupuncture on lower back pain patients over the last few months with some really exciting results so I thought I’d better do a post about acupuncture for lower back pain.

Despite a mere 5000 year history of success acupuncture continues to be a hotly debated therapy in the medical community. So saying, as more scientific research is done into its effects it is slowly winning acceptance and indeed in some countries it has made the leap to being no longer considered ‘alternative’.

Firstly- why is acupuncture still debated if it’s proven to be effective? One of the issues acupuncture has is that in order to be scientifically considered ‘proven’ a medical therapy must be given in a standardised dose and compared against a placebo (inert) treatment in a way that the patient doesn’t know whether they’re getting the active treatment or not. This is great way to test drugs because you can easily make up some sugar pills and compare them to the real thing to see how much of the benefit is due to the medication and what is ‘just placebo’. However with acupuncture it is not so easy to test in this way- for a start the principles of acupuncture entail that each person has to be treated as an individual so ‘true’ acupuncture should never just be a standardised treatment for everyone. Also, how on earth do you give placebo needling? To their credit researchers have thought up some pretty nifty ways of tricking patients into thinking that they’re getting acupuncture when they’re not but it will never be as clear-cut as just giving someone a fake pill. (As a side note- researchers into exercise have the same problem. How do you give people ‘placebo’ exercise?)

So does acupuncture help lower back pain?

Yes – there’s been a huge amount of research done into this question and it almost universally shows good results for acupuncture. One of the biggest and most thorough trials was done in Germany on 1,250 patients who had long term back pain. These people had pretty major problems- on average the people in this study had had back pain for eight years. They were divided up into two groups to be given either acupuncture or conventional therapy (medications, exercises and physiotherapy). The results showed that the acupuncture group had far better results than the conventional therapy group and that these results lasted. When the patients were all followed up 6 months after the treatment almost half (47%) of those who received acupuncture were better whereas only 27% of those who had conventional therapy were better. A huge result for acupuncture!

Another issue in acupuncture research is a disagreement about how it actually works. Traditional Chinese explanations are thousands of years old and come from a world-view where lots of what we would consider natural phenomena were explained in terms of supernatural or metaphysical causes. I think the challenge for our era is to keep the holistic principles of Chinese medicine which include treating people as individuals who live in dynamic relationship with their environment while also accepting that we do know a lot more about how the body works now than the Chinese did 5000 years ago. In my view modern research has shown fairly conclusively that acupuncture works mostly through the nervous system and works because of it’s effects on the brain. This is leading to a reformulation of some of the traditional treatment techniques to accommodate modern knowledge of the nervous system. I think this adaptation is really exciting and will lead to more powerful therapeutic results and greater acceptance by the medical community in the future.

Acupuncture is not a panacea but it is definitely a safe, effective and natural therapy with a fascinating past and an exciting future.