Acupuncture Sticks It to Cancer Pain

Acupuncture has emerged as a new complement to treating cancer. Recently our contributors have mentioned the use of complementary medicine—or CM—as a means to treating cancer along with the widely used treatment of chemotherapy.

While helping show the statistics involved for the use of CM among cancer patients and survivors, the recent article says, "Previous studies have relied on limited data, focusing on patients in active treatment, small sample sizes and single or few cancer types." One such study has focused on just a few types of cancer, but its limited data is not bad news for acupuncturists or patients.

With its debut at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting earlier this year in Chicago, a new study was released specific to acupuncture's help in the cancer fight. The research was limited to head and neck cancer patients. More invasive studies still have to be done but the study using acupuncture—a therapeutic remedy using tiny needles inserted into many points all over the body—along with radiation and surgery have fared well in clinical trials.

Most head and neck cancers are usually treated with a neck dissection—a surgical procedure to remove lymph nodes in the neck that may be cancerous—some of these can involve removing all the lymph nodes as well as muscles in the neck that could be harmed by tumors and then most patients follow up surgery with radiation to shrink the tumors. Patients often complain of severe cases of dry mouth, nausea, chronic pain (especially if their muscles and nerves were removed), and vomiting due to the radiation therapy.

The study Acupuncture Reduces Pain and Dysfunction in Head and Neck Cancer Patients after Neck Dissection done by Dr. David Pfister of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center picked 70 random patients to research over a period of four weeks. All the patients had been recovered from radiation and surgery for three months prior to the study. They were put into two groups: acupuncture and usual care (physical therapy and/or anti-inflammatory drugs). The acupuncture group had a 39 percent improvement in dry mouth, pain and movement dysfunction over the usual care group which had only a 7 percent improvement.

Even though the acupuncture group percentage is significantly higher, it seems that the major symptoms improved were dry mouth and dysfunction as well as general pain. While this is a great advancement in the CM world, the work isn't over yet. Dr. Pfister comments, "Chronic pain and shoulder mobility problems are common after such surgery, adversely affecting quality of life as well as employability for certain occupations, unfortunately, available conventional methods of treatment for pain and dysfunction following neck surgery often have limited benefits, leaving much room for improvement."

Dr. Cassileth, another doctor on the team at Sloane-Kettering, reminds readers that acupuncture doesn't always work for everyone, but if a patient plans to go, make sure to go to a certified acupuncturist from a national agency or by one that specializes in specific cancer and cancer treatments.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) also recently reported in a study of over 4,000 survivors of ten different types of cancer, that acupuncture is being used as an alternative to pain medication. Co-author Ted Gansler of the ACS and CANCER peer journal reports, "Surprisingly, other methods such as acupuncture...were used by fewer than 2% of cancer survivors, even though recent studies found them to be useful in relieving some cancer-related symptoms, such as pain."

Maybe if the media keeps poking around the subject, more and more cancer survivors will be aware that acupuncture is a valid alternative source to pain medications and other conventional methods.