Acupuncture for analgesia in the emergency department

2017-11-06 16:37:52

This study looked at acupuncture, alone or in combination with pharmacotherapy, to patients presenting to emergency departments with acute low back pain, migraine, or ankle sprain ⁽¹⁾ . A pragmatic, multicentre, randomised, assessor-blinded, equivalence and non-inferiority trial of analgesia was conducted. The primary outcome measures were pain at one hour, using a validated scale. The results showed that equivalence and non-inferiority of treatment groups was found overall and for the low back pain and ankle sprain groups in both intention-to-treat and per protocol analyses15.6% of patients had clinically relevant pain relief and 36.9% had statistically relevant pain relief at 1 hour. The authors conclude that the effectiveness of acupuncture in providing acute analgesia for patients with back pain and ankle sprain was comparable with that of pharmacotherapy. Acupuncture is a safe and acceptable form of analgesia, but none of the examined therapies provided optimal acute analgesia.