Painful Periods? How About Acupuncture?| Dr.Steve’s Bottom Line

Dr.Steve’s BOTTOM LINE: Painful periods are known as dysmenorrhea, in medicalese. Standard treatment depends on why the uterus is misbehaving, but include over the counter pain pills through heftier drugs and possibly surgery. There are really multiple causes, so this post is a tad too short to cover all that. Suffice it to say, especially if you’re living it or living with someone in this pain, it’s pretty miserable. Standard treatment often fails. So, what about the ancient art of acupuncture? Does it work?

This  large review of MANY published medical studies looked at how effective acupuncture is in helping control painful periods. Of the 27 studies published that were listed as “randomized” (the gold standard of clinical trials), only 9 really met the criteria of being well designed and carried out. Remember, although we can wish for results, it’s garbage in, garbage out. In other words a study that is lousy in design will not give you an accurate answer for what you are asking. To make a long story short, some of the studies showed VERY promising and effective results, while others were a bit less enthusiastic in results reporting. All of them had some flaws in design, but the bottom line is that some of then showed a clear advantage to acupuncture over the use of drugs or herbals. Bottom line? It’s worth a try and the risk is very low. BONUS tip:  try Vitamin E, Vitamin B1, Omega-3 Fish Oil, magnesium, not all together but one at a time….might help and there is decent research evidence for each.

Acupuncture for primary dysmenorrhoea: a systematic review.

BJOG. 2010 Feb 17;

Authors: Cho SH, Hwang EW  Background The effectiveness of acupuncture in primary dysmenorrhoea is not fully understood. Objectives To assess the effectiveness of acupuncture for the symptomatic treatment of primary dysmenorrhoea from randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Search strategy Nineteen electronic databases, including English, Korean, Japanese and Chinese databases, were systematically searched for RCTs investigating acupuncture for primary dysmenorrhoea up to July 2008 with no language restrictions. Selection criteria All RCTs that evaluated the effects of acupuncture compared with controls were included. Studies that assessed the effect of moxibustion or body acupressure were excluded. Data collection and analysis The study abstraction and quality assessment of all studies were undertaken following the detailed descriptions of these categories as described in the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Main results Twenty-seven RCTs were systematically reviewed. Only nine of the 27 trials clearly described their methods of randomisation and none of the trials stated the methods of allocation concealment. Compared with pharmacological treatment or herbal medicine, acupuncture was associated with a significant reduction in pain. Three studies reported reduced pain within groups from baseline; however, two RCTs did not find a significant difference between acupuncture and sham acupuncture. Author’s conclusions The review found promising evidence in the form of RCTs for the use of acupuncture in the treatment of primary dysmenorrhoea compared with pharmacological treatment or herbal medicine. However, the results were limited by methodological flaws. The evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhoea is not convincing compared with sham acupuncture. Further rigorous nonpenetrating placebo-controlled RCTs are warranted.

PMID: 20184568 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]