You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
EBM notebook
Evidently…
  1. Richard Lehman, MA, MRCGP
  1. Department of Primary Care, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    https://doi.org/10.1136/ebm.10.2.39

    Statistics from Altmetric.com

      Request Permissions

      If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

      Acupuncture has a huge literature—much of it written in Chinese ideographs—and finding methodologically sound studies is like looking for the proverbial acupuncture needle in a distant haystack. No one has tried harder than Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at Peninsula Medical School in the south west of England. His latest systematic review is of acupuncture for labour pain (

      Am J Obstet Gynecol2004;191:1573–9
      OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science
      ), undertaken with Hyangsook Lee from Korea. They started with 390 papers and ended up with 3; these all show some reduction in analgesic use but are inconclusive due to insufficient blinding of the assessors. The methodology of these trials is a prickly issue: a UK study of acupuncture for chronic headache (
      Health Technol Assess2004;8:iii, 1–35
      OpenUrlPubMed
      ) used “usual care” as the comparator, but a Spanish trial for knee pain () used sham acupuncture. Both showed modest improvement. Traditional Chinese medicine would put this down to De-Qi, removing the stagnation of bad essences.Sure enough, acupuncture has even been tried for …

      View Full Text

      Footnotes

      • ↵* These summaries are of additional articles that passed our validity criteria but were not abstracted.