{"id":674,"date":"2018-03-07T02:31:54","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T02:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/?p=674"},"modified":"2018-03-15T02:34:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T02:34:15","slug":"should-doctors-recommend-acupuncture-for-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/?p=674","title":{"rendered":"Should Doctors Recommend Acupuncture For Pain?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Some see acupuncture as a safe alternative to drugs, while others argue there&#8217;s no convincing evidence of clinical benefit and potential for harm. So should doctors recommend acupuncture for pain? Experts debate the issue in The BMJ today.<\/p>\n<p>Acupuncture is a safe alternative to drugs for chronic pain, argues Mike Cummings, Medical Director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society and Associate Editor of the journal Acupuncture in Medicine, published by BMJ.<\/p>\n<p>In the US, acupuncture is recommended for back pain, but in the UK, it is no longer included in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence&#8217;s (NICE) guidelines for low back pain, although it remains in the NICE guideline on headaches, he explains.<\/p>\n<p>He acknowledges that acupuncture &#8220;seems to incur more staffing and infrastructure costs than drug based interventions, and in an era of budget restriction, cutting services is a popular short term fix.&#8221; But argues that group clinics in the community &#8220;can provide more treatment at much lower cost.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Acupuncture enthusiasts often emphasise &#8220;pragmatic&#8221; comparisons between acupuncture and usual care. However, they argue that &#8220;unblinded pragmatic trials cannot differentiate possible true effects of acupuncture from placebo effects and bias.&#8221; To inform us reliably of any causal relation between acupuncture and effect, &#8220;we need to focus on adequately blinded &#8220;explanatory&#8221; acupuncture trials,&#8221; they say.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If acupuncture is endorsed as a theatrical placebo we should be discussing the ethics of placebo interventions, not the elusive effect of acupuncture,&#8221; they add.<\/p>\n<p>Continue Reading at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2018\/03\/180307230411.htm\">Science Daily<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some see acupuncture as a safe alternative to drugs, while others argue there&#8217;s no convincing evidence of clinical benefit and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[12,13],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acupuncture","category-articles","tag-acupuncture","tag-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":676,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions\/676"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alternativemedicine.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}