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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a consensus development statement on acupuncture. The two and one-half day conference that culminated in the consensus statement was organized by the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and the NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research. Panelists at the conference included experts from the fields of acupuncture, pain, psychology and psychiatry, physical medicine and rehabilitation, drug abuse, family practice, internal medicine, physiology and biophysics, health policy, epidemiology and statistics.
The consensus statement discusses the efficacy of acupuncture, the role of acupuncture in the treatment of various conditions, the biologic effects of acupuncture, the issues that need to be addressed so that acupuncture is appropriately incorporated into the health care system and the directions for future research. The following is a summary of these key areas.
Efficacy of Acupuncture
According to the consensus statement, the quality of a number of studies is sufficient for assessing the efficacy of acupuncture for certain conditions. However, the report also notes that high-quality research in which acupuncture is compared with placebo or sham acupuncture is scant. Most of the published research is on needle acupuncture (needle or electroacupuncture) and does not encompass the full spectrum of acupuncture techniques and practices. The assessment of efficacy by the consensus panel focused on high-quality clinical trials that compared acupuncture with sham acupuncture or placebo.
The report notes that clinical experience suggests that the majority of patients have a beneficial response to acupuncture. Clinical outcomes research, however, suggests that a larger proportion of patients may not respond.
Much of the research on acupuncture has been...