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Acupuncture’s Role in Solving the Opioid Epidemic

Photo Credit: Pacific College of Oriental Medicine

There are ways that acupuncture can help alleviate the opioid abuse epidemic wreaking havoc in America. According to a 2017 white paper, Acupuncture’s Role in Solving the Opioid Epidemic, written by dozens of authors from a half-dozen different organizations of acupuncturists and Traditional Chinese Medicine professionals, acupuncture is an effective and safe treatment for both acute and chronic pain. The publication cites evidence, cost-effectiveness and care availability for acupuncture as a primary, non-pharmacologic method for pain relief and management

Over the past 20 years, pain management has become nearly synonymous with opioids. Recent data has shown that opioid prescriptions vary widely, and that most surgical patients are over-prescribed, with 70 percent of pills going unused, leaving opioids lying around in many households. About 6 percent of all Americans prescribed opioids after surgery become dependent upon those opioids; in head and neck cancer patients, however, it’s as high as 40 percent. Although they do manage pain, even for those that don’t become dependent, opioids lengthen patients’ recovery times through side effects like sedation, pneumonia and delirium.

Acupuncture, on the other hand, is a safe, affordable and readily available non-pharmacologic approach to decreasing opioid dependence that our healthcare system badly needs. It can be used in hospital settings from the emergency room to delivery room, and it’s already in use by the Veterans Administration and the military. A growing body of research supports the effectiveness of acupuncture for the relief of pain, especially chronic pain, with the strongest evidence emerging for back, neck and shoulder pain, chronic headaches and osteoarthritis.

The Acupuncture Evidence Project searched the medical literature with a focus on the strongest evidence available to identify the conditions for which acupuncture has been found to be most effective. They also looked for evidence of acupuncture’s safety and cost-effectiveness, and reported how the evidence for acupuncture’s effectiveness has changed over an 11-year time frame. Overall, the study found evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture for 117 conditions, with more for some conditions than others.

Evidence supports strong or moderate effectiveness of acupuncture for almost 50 conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, many varieties of musculoskeletal pain, postoperative nausea and vomiting, some types of headaches, post-traumatic stress disorder, obesity and stroke, as well as the aftereffects of stroke. It was also found to be particularly safe and cost-effective compared to other potential treatments for allergic rhinitis and migraine.

In the largest study of its kind to date, nearly 500,000 patients were treated with acupuncture for headache, low back pain, and/or osteoarthritis in an open pragmatic (designed to test the effectiveness of the intervention) trial; treating physicians rated it as effective in 76 percent of all cases. Minor side effects were seen in 8 percent of patients, and major side effects in 13 patients total. Other studies found acupuncture, particularly electroacupuncture, equal or superior to standard care for sciatica, joint pain, post-surgical discomfort and difficult-to-treat fibromyalgia.

 

Pacific College of Oriental Medicine – Chicago is located at 65 E. Wacker Pl., Ste. 2100. For more information, call 773-477-4822 or visit PacificCollege.edu/patients/Chicago.