Acupuncture is Effective for Treating Knee Osteoarthritis

A recent study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Center for Integrative Medicine shows that acupuncture, in combination with standard therapy, provides more pain relief and better improvement in joint function than education control or placebo. Because acupuncture is effective and relatively safe, especially when compared with current therapies like Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors, acupuncture may have an important role in a multidisciplinary approach to managing pain due to osteoarthritis.

In the study completed by researchers at the University of Maryland, 570 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were randomized into three groups- control, sham acupuncture, and true acupuncture. The control group received standard allopathic intervention and 6 two-hour group sessions based on the Arthritis Self-Management Program. The sham and true acupuncture groups received standard treatment and 26 weeks of gradually tapering acupuncture therapy. At the 8 week mark of the study, the true acupuncture group already showed significant increase in joint function over the education control group, and at 14 weeks they were significantly better than the sham acupuncture group in pain relief.

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease that causes pain and difficulty in walking. In standard allopathic medical therapy, no curative treatments exist. The focus of current medical treatment is palliative, using both pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions in a multi-faceted pain management approach. While non-pharmacologic interventions include patient education, exercise, weight-loss, and social support, the pharmacologic interventions such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, opioid analgesics, and steroidal injections used to moderate pain are often ineffective and have dangerous side-effects. The most glaring being the increase in heart disease recently reported with the use of the popular COX-2 inhibitors Vioxx and Celebrex. Because of its relative safety, and its demonstrated effectiveness in managing pain and increasing function in osteoarthritis of the knee, acupuncture should be an integral component of the management of degenerative joint pain. This study demonstrates an important way in which Traditional Chinese Medicine can be integrated with current medical care.