In Part 1, I spoke about a friend of mine who was receiving acupuncture for her debilitating pelvic pain and subsequently her symptoms and quality of life improved. Unfortunately, a catastrophic car accident stopped her treatments all together.
I also spoke to the efficacy of acupuncture as an appropriate treatment and cited one study. In that study, the lead author went so far as recommend that acupuncture be the conventional treatment offered to sufferers.
Criticism towards the study could be made that the sample size was too small or that the study was performed in Taiwan. China has not had a stellar record with reliable clinic trials.
These are valid points: unfortunately small sample sizes are an all too frequent an occurrence in traditional medical trials. One of the reasons being that there is just a lack of money allocated for natural therapies and their study.
One major reason is that you cannot patent it or over charge as is the case with many pharmaceutical drugs. But that is a subject for another day.
What I wish to bring to your attention are two further studies to support the one mentioned in my prior article on CPP. The first article I wish to bring to your attention is a pilot study published in the Journal of Urology entitled “Acupuncture ameliorates symptoms in men with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome”.
The authors are Richard Chen and J. Curtis Nickel from The Department of Urology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Patients whose pain was unmanageable with conventional methods (antibiotics, alpha-blockers, anti-inflammatories, phytotherapy) received acupuncture for 6 weeks.
They saw that 83% of their patients suffering from CCP had seen over a 50% decrease in symptoms after the study’s end. What is interesting about this study is that the patients were treated with acupuncture twice weekly for 6 weeks, but after 6 months the decrease in pain was still reported.
Their conclusions were that acupuncture is a low risk, effective and long-lasting treatment in improving the symptoms and life of men with chronic pelvic pain who are stubborn to improve with usual treatment. The authors cited the problem with the study, http://www.goldjournal.net/article/S0090-4295(03)00141-9/abstract, which is that a larger study would be required to confirm their initial results.
That brings us to the second study I wish to bring to your attention: a large study to confirm the effectiveness of acupuncture on CPP as published in American Journal of Medicine: http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(07)00937-0/abstract.
Eighty-nine men who had been confirmed to suffer from chronic pelvic pain were randomly assigned to 2 groups: One received fake acupuncture for ten weeks while the other group received real acupuncture for ten weeks.
Pain was measured at baseline and at the end of the 10-week sessions.
The study proved that acupuncture is an effective treatment for a condition that conventional medicine has had a hard time treating. It also found that those who received acupuncture were more than twice as likely to improve than those who received sham acupuncture.
Drop the microphone! This dispute has been won.
If you or someone you know has been silently suffering from chronic pelvic pain please call Onsite Therapy. Perhaps your friend or family member is too embarrassed to tell you that their all-consuming pain is originating from their pelvic area.
Remember acupuncture successfully treats all kinds of pain. Please remind them of this and help to spread this information. Refer them to Onsite Therapy. It could truly be a life changer.
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 © 2016 by Adam Lawrence Taylor Use of this article, from the author, is granted provided that full and clear credit is given to Adam Lawrence Taylor and www.onsitetherapy.ca with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Disclaimer The views expressed in this blog are my own are should not constitute advice. |
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