Can Acupuncture Help Cancer Survivors with Chronic Pain?

Post extracted from National Cancer Instituteat the National Institutes of Health , , by NCI Staff.

Two types of acupuncture may help reduce chronic pain in cancer survivors, results from a large clinical trial suggest. Cancer survivors who participated in the study reported modest improvements in pain after receiving acupuncture compared with those who received standard pain treatments.

Although several studies have found that acupuncture appears to reduce pain in people without cancer, the trial is one of the first large randomized clinical studies designed to test whether the therapy might offer relief for cancer-related pain in survivors of a host of different cancers. 

The researchers who led this new trial acknowledged several factors that could have affected its results, including that there was no group of participants who received a placebo version of acupuncture. Other researchers not involved in the study also pointed out that the lack of a placebo “arm” of the trial makes it difficult to rule out the possibility that the pain improvements reported by those who received acupuncture were the result of a “placebo effect.” …

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Post extracted from National Cancer Instituteat the National Institutes of Health , , by NCI Staff.