Brian Berman, MD
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis that we have. It affects about 21 million Americans each year. It consists of several overlapping diseases, where we have a destruction of the cartilage, and usually an erosion of the bone underneath it. And the result of that is pain; a decrease in physical function; and usually a decrease in getting around and [an increase] in disability.

There’s no cure for osteoarthritis. And so often, people are looking for ways to reduce their pain and their, improve their physical functioning. The standard care for treatment is either pharmacologic or non-pharmacologic therapies.

The non-pharmacologic therapies are things like exercise, weight loss, occupational physical therapy, and education. Then, people are put on different pharmacologic medications, things like anti-inflammatory [medicines], nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory [medicines], Cox-2 inhibitors, and even narcotics and injections.

Unfortunately, people often don’t get adequate pain relief. And sometimes the side effects, especially in the elderly…, are worse than the disease itself. So, people are looking for other answers. They’re looking at different complementary alternative therapies. And one of them is acupuncture.

So, we actually decided to study acupuncture. The study that we recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine was a study for acupuncture for osteoarthritis of the knees in people 50 years and older. We wanted to see if true Chinese acupuncture was more effective than sham acupuncture [or} an education control group.

And what we found was that the patients in the true acupuncture group improved in physical functioning by the eight-week period of time. And it was statistically different from the other two groups. And that held; it was maintained throughout the 26 weeks.

They also improved with their pain relief by 14 weeks. And that was also maintained throughout the rest of the study, for 26 weeks. And, it was a safe treatment and well tolerated. There were no serious adverse effects related to the acupuncture itself.

So we concluded that acupuncture is a safe and effective adjunctive therapy —used in combination with standard care — for people with moderate to severe osteoarthritis of the knees. And we said the implications is that it should be considered as part of a multidisciplinary integrative approach for osteoarthritis of the knees.