Kylie Petrie, 6, receives regular acupuncture treatments at the Su and Jin Family Acupuncturre and Herb Clinic in Ballard to help ease symptoms of asthma.
ADVERTISEMENT
How Effective is Acupuncture?
Acupuncture has been the subject of many clinical studies, including ones that have looked at the effect the therapy has on nausea and vomiting related to chemotherapy.
The first phase of GerAc (German Acupuncture Trials) on the benefits of acupuncture began in 2001 and involved more than 40,000 patients. The patients suffered from lower back pain, migraines or tension headaches and other medical problems and had been experiencing symptoms for at least six months. Participants received 10 sessions of acupuncture.
After the study was over, this phase showed that almost nine out of 10 participants experienced pain relief.
Some studies suggest that although acupuncture works for pain relief, sham acupuncture works almost as well. (Sham acupuncture, although controversial, is used in some studies as a kind of placebo. Practitioners pretend to put needles in the skin or put them in places that are not true acupuncture points.) Researchers don’t fully understand how acupuncture works, but it is thought that our bodies might react positively to any thin needle prick, which could help in releasing endorphins and pain-fighting chemicals in the body.
Although acupuncture has become more mainstream in the United States within the past few years, some studies have had mixed results and the effectiveness of acupuncture is still somewhat controversial in the scientific community.
The World Health Organization, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, the American Medical Association and other government reports have also studied and commented on the efficacy of acupuncture. The groups agree that acupuncture is generally safe, but that further research is warranted for specific complaints.
From the time he was born, Erik Petrie’s tiny body was ravaged by eczema.
“It was pretty severe,” said Erik’s mother, Christina Petrie, of Seattle. “It was on his face, legs and arms.”
Petrie breast fed her son for his first year of life. She thought that changing her diet might ease his eczema, but it didn’t help. She was reluctant to use steroid cream over large portions of her baby’s body. “He was two or three months old,” Petrie says.
She decided to try acupuncture, and at 3 years old, Erik began his treatments. His condition is much improved in the first few months of treatment, his mother says.
Petrie’s 6-year-old sons, Kyle and John, also receive acupuncture to ease their asthma symptoms. Kyle’s asthma is particularly severe, and he has suffered an attack that put him in hospital. Petrie did not want her son to use common asthma drugs for years, so she began to think about what she could do to keep his body from closing down his airways. She took Kyle for acupuncture, and, again, has seen some improvement in symptoms.
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese therapy that dates back more than 2000 years. It’s based on the belief that all humans have energy, or Chi, that flows to more than 350 points throughout the body inside pathways called meridians. When the flow of energy is blocked or disrupted, then an area is stimulated by the insertion of a thin needle along meridians. This way the energy flows and, in turn, helps the body to heal.
Western Acceptance
Anne Lynn, professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, has been treating some of her patients with acupuncture for the past year for pain control, back pain, nausea or vomiting. Another doctor at Children’s has been providing the therapy for six years.
“I think that some Western medicine tends to ignore that there is a mind-body connection. And there is one,” Lynn says. “Everybody has energy. When it’s flowing, everything is great. When it’s locked, it can cause pain.”
Lynn finds that children, unlike adults, have no pre-conceived notion of acupuncture. A small but growing group of children is being treated with acupuncture to help with reactions to anesthesia. Parents “are sometimes surprised it’s an option,” Lynn says.
The children receive the acupuncture while they are asleep under anesthesia. “You won’t even know it,” Lynn tells them. Although Lynn is hoping to do a study in a controlled environment, she has experienced children waking more smoothly and calmly from anesthesia when in previous situations they might have been vomiting or had an agitated awakening.
Lynn sees the treatment as not an either/or, but that patients can combine Western and acupuncture treatments. “They can do both,” Lynn says. “One to make the other work better.”
Most patients Lynn sees are open to the idea of trying acupuncture. Some, she says, are still skeptical as to whether it will have any measurable effect. There are some patients who have treatments and it has no effect on them. “In most large populations about 10 percent don’t seem to respond,” Lynn says. That’s nine out of 10 that acupuncture does seem to help.
Eastern Practice
“Any kind of disharmony, we deal with it,” said Yiwen Su, doctor of acupuncture and Oriental medicine at Su and Jin Family Acupuncture and Herb Clinic in Ballard. Su and partner Li Jin see children of all ages at their clinic, many of them referred to them by medical doctors. Some insurance companies cover the $100 plus initial consultation and following appointments.
Typically babies and children with asthma, eczema, digestive problems, allergies and bed-wetting receive acupuncture as treatment for their ailments.
After a consultation, Jin takes a pulse, which in babies she finds under the skin and tongue. If she deems that the child would benefit from acupuncture and not acupressure, a needle-free technique, Jin prepares a tiny sterile needle less than two millimeters long.
“You almost can’t see it,” Jin said. “It’s a special needle and technique.”
Jin places the needle in the skin with a sticker attached to it. The following day the parent takes the sticker off and the needle comes off, too.
Another method that Su and Jin use is to put the small needles in place, then quickly remove them.
“There is no comparison to shots and injections that you get when in hospital,” Su says.
Patient Comfort
Both Su and Lynn describe to their young patients what is going to happen during acupuncture to make sure that the children are comfortable with the procedure. They show them what the hair-thin needle looks like and how, unlike an injection, there is only a little tap sensation.
“Many people can’t feel them going in at all,” Lynn says.
If kids are uncomfortable with the idea of the needles, then practitioners can offer acupressure, in which they press tools, fingers or thumbs on the appropriate pressure points. It is less effective than acupuncture. Either during or between appointments, clients can have beads pressed on and just inside their earlobes. The beads are placed to correspond with acupuncture points in the body. At home, patients press on the beads from time to time to help the Chi flow though their bodies. Beads used alone are not as strong as acupuncture or acupressure.
So many children in hospital have little control over what is happening to them. Lynn likes them to be involved in this decision making process. “If they don’t want needles, they don’t get them,” Lynn says.
Petrie’s three boys are all pretty comfortable with acupuncture, even if there is a pinch or a prick feeling. If the boys have the option to go to the playground or to get needles in their skin, then the choice is clear. “Don’t get me wrong,” Petrie says. “They aren’t happy about it.”
Their mother reads to them, holds their hands and talks while Su or Jin provides the treatment. “We talk beforehand about why we are doing it,” she says.
Petrie does believe that Western medicine has its place and is extremely grateful that it was available when Kyle’s airways shut down. But she wanted to get to the underlying root cause of the asthma, instead of merely treating the symptoms.
What Petrie would like parents to remember is that when you put something like a steroid cream on your child, the symptoms respond more quickly than to acupuncture, but the problem is still there.
“Acupuncture will take a certain amount of time to get from the root up as opposed to putting a Band-Aid on it,” Petrie said. “Parents should go in prepared to stick it out for the long haul and not quit halfway through.”
Christina Harper is a Snohomish County writer and mother of two.
Editor's note: This article has been revised since it was first published. In the original version, Seattle's Child erroneously stated that homeopathic treatments did not help ease Erik Petrie's eczema. In fact, they did.
