Radiotherapy-induced Nausea Cannot Be Relieved by Acupuncture, Says Study

by Sreeraman on  September 27, 2007 at 5:22 PM Alternative Medicine News
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Radiotherapy-induced Nausea Cannot Be Relieved by Acupuncture, Says Study
Though cancer patients and health specialists believe that acupuncture offers relief from radiotherapy-induced nausea, a new study has revealed that it does not.

The study analysed the effectiveness of acupuncture in 215 patients with various type of cancers.

The patients were given either active acupuncture or a sham treatment that involved an identical looking and feeling needle that retracted into the handle on contact with the skin.

“Both groups of patients reported they believed the treatment had been invasive and effective in reducing nausea. However, 68 percent of patients who got the acupuncture experienced nausea for an average of 19 days during radiotherapy and 61 percent of the patients who got the sham treatment suffered nausea for an average of 17 days,” said the study’s lead researcher Anna Enblom, a physiotherapist and doctoral student at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Linköping University in Sweden.

“Vomiting was experienced by 24 percent of the patients getting acupuncture and 28 percent of patients receiving the sham treatment,” Enblom added. Fifty-eight of the patients received chemotherapy in combination with radiotherapy. Among them, 82 percent of those in the acupuncture group developed nausea, compared with 80 percent of those treated with the sham needles.

“There was no statistically significant difference between the groups in the number of days with nausea or vomiting or in the intensity of the nausea, neither in the patients receiving radiotherapy alone, nor in those receiving a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy,” said Enblom.

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