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Does acupuncture help chronic low back pain?
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Does acupuncture help chronic low back pain?
What are the effects of acupuncture compared with sham intervention, no treatment or usual care for chronic non-specific low back pain?
For people with persistent pain, moderate‐certainty evidence showed that acupuncture provided a clinically significant level of immediate pain relief when compared with no treatment.
However, when acupuncture was compared with sham acupuncture or usual treatment, although still generating a statistically significant difference, low-certainty evidence showed the reduction in pain was not enough to be considered clinically significant.
The incidence of adverse events was generally similar between acupuncture and sham acupuncture or usual care. Therefore, acupuncture might be a safe treatment for people with chronic LBP.
In clinical practice, the decision to use acupuncture to treat chronic LBP may depend on treatment availability, cost and, importantly, participant or provider preference.
None of the included studies guaranteed that participants or acupuncturists had been blinded successfully, and all the primary outcomes were self‐reported. Therefore, none of the evidence was high certainty. Quality was further compromised by a combination of a high risk of bias for co‐interventions, unequal or high dropout rates, failure to use intention‐to‐treat analyses, inconsistency and imprecision.
Chronic non-specific LBP is very common. It is defined as pain without a recognisable aetiology that lasts for more than 3 months. Some clinical practice guidelines suggest that acupuncture can offer an effective alternative therapy.
Mu J, et al. Acupuncture for chronic nonspecific low back pain. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2020, Issue 12. Art. No.: CD013814. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD013814. This review contains 33 trials with a total of 8270 participants.