North Staffordshire osteoarthritis patients to take part in major acupuncture trial
Three hundred and fifty patients in north Staffordshire with osteoarthritis of the knee are to be recruited onto a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of acupuncture.
Acupuncture is increasingly being used to relieve pain in a number of chronic conditions, including osteoarthritis, but there is still no conclusive clinical evidence that it works.
Now a team led by Dr Elaine Hay, a rheumatologist at the Haywood Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent and senior lecturer at the Primary Care Sciences Research Centre, Keele University, is to carry out a trial with a three-year grant of £106,207 from the Arthritis Research Campaign.
"The use of acupuncture by patients with arthritic pain has increased in the past decade, but despite its popularity for the relief of painful symptoms and its availability within the NHS and GP practices, good studies of its benefits are lacking," explained Dr Hay.
"Our study proposes to investigate if the addition of acupuncture to the normal service provided by physiotherapists provides more pain relief in knee pain in older adults."
Patients will be recruited via general practices and community physiotherapy departments who are part of the North Staffordshire Primary Care Consortium in Stoke on Trent. They will be split into three groups. One group will be offered exercise and advice, and the other two groups will be offered exercise, advice and two slightly different types of acupuncture. All patients will be followed up for six months to see which treatment offers the best pain relief.
Until recently the Arthritis Research Campaign, the fifth biggest medical research charity in the UK, funded research into traditional therapies, but in response to the explosion of public interest in complementary therapies over the past few years, it has now started to fund work into acupuncture, magnetic bracelets, and cod liver oil.
A spokeswoman for the ARC said there was enormous public interest in complementary therapies among arthritis patients, and there was a corresponding need to prove or disprove whether they were effective, or simply a waste of patients' money.
