Recently a review paper by Drs. Coeytaux and Befus found
that acupuncture treatment is quite effective in treating migraine,
tension-type headache and several different types of chronic headache
disorders. The study was published in journal of Headache.
Drs. Coeytaux and Befus reviewed many systematic reviews and
meta-analyses studies, including three arguably most important and informative
systematic reviews of effectiveness of acupuncture for primary headache
disorders and papers showing that acupuncture was superior to sham acupuncture for
relieving pain and reducing the use of medication for acute migraine attacks.
They found that there is a sufficient number of published
trials that showed acupuncture is effective as an adjunct to usual care in the
management or prevention of common headache disorders compared with usual care
only, medication management and sham acupuncture 2 month after treatment,
although the outcome of the longer-follow-up was mixed. Further, growing
literatures presented that acupuncture is a cost-effective in the Germany and
United Kingdom.
The authors suggested that additional sham controlled
trials are not likely to definitively clarify the extent to which nonspecific
effects contribute to observed clinical benefit associated with acupuncture. “This
area of research and practice would be well served by comparative
effectiveness, safety, or cost-effectiveness trials. Such trials could provide
clear guidance to patients and their healthcare providers who seek to better
understand what benefits, potential harms, and economic costs they might expect
from acupuncture relative to other therapeutic approaches for treating or
preventing migraine, tension-type headache, medication overuse headache, or
other common headache disorders.”
Reference
RR Coeytaux & D
Befus, Role of Acupuncture in the Treatment or Prevention of Migraine,
Tension-Type Headache, or Chronic Headache Disorders. Headache. 2016
Jul;56(7):1238-40. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27411557
No comments:
Post a Comment