A study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for migraine headaches against "sham acupuncture" where the doctors used needles at non-acupuncture points. The results of the two groups were virtually identical: a 2.2-day reduction in the number of days with moderate or severe headaches in a four-week period. That's significantly better than the 0.8-day reduction for the control "waiting list" group that got no treatment, but begs the obvious question: why spend years studying acupuncture if needle location doesn't really matter?
As a side note, I'm too cheap to pay the $12 to to download the full paper, but there's a nice breakdown of the study at the UK National electronic Library for Health. (Thanks to Bob Park's What's New for the link!)
Posted by bug to Science at May 13, 2005 4:24 PM | TrackBack