Acupuncture For Migraine Prophylaxis: A Randomized Control Trial by Li et al

Recurrent and chronic headaches are a major source of morbidity and costs are substantial (Li et al., 2012). Understandably, medical researchers are looking for more cost-effective treatments for this condition. Acupuncture is widely used for the treatment of headaches in industrialized countries and it may be applied as a single modality as well as part of a more complex treatment program. Despite this popularity, there is still debate about whether acupuncture has ‘specific’ effects, that is, effects over and above placebo. (Li et al., 2012).

In this research, the authors conducted a single-blinded, randomized controlled trial for a period of 21 months in nine big hospitals in the Republic of China. Patients were invited mainly through the media and hospital clinics. They administered 20 sessions of electro-acupuncture to the patients through either sham acupuncture points or one of the three traditionally based Chinese medicine acupuncture point’s prescriptions for more than five weeks. The interest of the author was to obtain some data on the specificity of acupuncture for migraine prophylaxis, with the outcome of the clinical procedures measured in ‘the number of days with headaches’ as listed in a headache diary (Li et al., 2012). Migraine Specific Quality of Life questionnaire was used to determine the secondary outcomes at baseline 4, 8 and 16 weeks (Li et al., 2012).

Four hundred and eighty patients were placed into the four trial groups thus giving allowance for those who will drop out and a 95% strength of statistical significance of a decrease in the number of headaches of 1.5 days migraines each month. Majority of the trials fulfilled that acupuncture offers benefits in the treatment of headache. However, the assessment of physical forms of treatment that includes acupuncture poses certain difficulties and thus specialized parameters in the study design need to be considered. Acupuncture techniques require individualization, a carefully chosen placebo, and the crossover design should have enough time between the two treatment periods. Clinical trials that evaluate acupuncture are often characterized by numerous inadequacies. However, an extra clinical research is usually needed to confirm its effectiveness and elucidate its indications (Li et al., 2012).