Whilst reviewing an article in my professional journal I came across an article about acupuncture and inflammatory arthritis, this was a study carried out by a Podiatry dept in Scotland to find out the effectiveness of acupuncture for Arthritic patients who had not responded to the usual type of foot treatments.There was a mixed bag of Rheumatoid, Pseudo, Oligo, systemic lupus and undifferentiated Arthritis.
The type of acupuncture used was not traditional Chinese acupuncture, but a new form known as modern or western acupuncture.
Modern or western acupuncture doesn’t generally use the idea of meridian points or look at the patient as being in a wet, hot or dry state of being, but rather focuses on the points of pain, taking these points to be “trigger” points and using different sized needles inserted into the trigger points at different levels, depending on whether the “TP” is deemed to be skin, muscle, tissue or bone deep and on the practitioner having the anatomical knowledge of the area of treatment.
The results of this study did show that out of the 28 people involved in which the majority of them had a a good outcome. Reduction in pain and discomfort was reduced by an average of 50%. The conditions treated were ankle pain, forefoot pain and restless leg syndrome.
I myself use western acupuncture to treat various different types of foot and leg conditions, and I can say anecdotally that in 75 to 80% of the cases that I have treated I have had at least 50% reduction in their pain and discomfort with probably 80% achieving this target within the first treatment.About 90% go on to achieve a further 50% of this within the 2nd treatment, so that’s only 25% of the original pain and discomfort and of these 90% again I would approximate that 90% of these people achieve complete resolution.
So what I am saying is that about 60 to 70% achieve a 75% reduction and about 60% a complete reduction. But remember this could be higher as I have not measured it.
If you have had any experience with acupuncture western or Chinese, what sort of experience have you had with it?