Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
A randomised-control trial has found that acupuncture can help reduce leg pain in patients with sciatica.
The study is published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese practice involving the insertion of needles into specific points in the body, known as “acupoints”.
While there’s evidence it can help treat chronic pain, the researchers say there is a lack of high-quality evidence to support its use with sciatica.
The Chinese team of researchers enrolled 216 patients in the trial, all of whom had chronic sciatica from a herniated spinal disc.
Patients were randomly assigned to either an acupuncture group or a control group, where they received 10 treatment sessions over 4 weeks.
Patients in the acupuncture group were treated by licensed acupuncturists with at least 3 years of experience, while the control group received a “sham acupuncture” treatment from the acupuncturists.
“For the sham group, acupuncturists used nonacupoints away from the meridians, which are considered to have no effect; this is common practice for sham controls in acupuncture research,” write the researchers in their paper.
Patients weren’t told which group they were in, and a blinding test showed they were still unaware after receiving the treatment. The researchers also didn’t know which group the patients were in, with only the acupuncturists being unblinded.
The researchers followed up with the patients 1, 2, 6 and 12 months after the intervention, asking them to rate their pain and capability with surveys frequently used in health research.
They found that patients who had the acupuncture treatment consistently reported lower pain and higher function, both immediately after and a year after the treatment.
While the acupuncture group was still doing better than the sham acupuncture group at the 1-year mark, the difference had narrowed compared to the 4-week mark.
“Given the large effect sizes that this trial found, acupuncture should be considered to be a potential treatment option for patients with chronic sciatica from herniated disk,” write the researchers in their paper.
They also propose doing more research comparing acupuncture with painkillers and surgery, both of which can have mixed results in sciatica patients.
