1995 Volume 1 Issue 1 Pages 93-99
We investigated acupuncture treatment for low back pain at National Tsukuba College of Technology Clinic.
Subjects were the charts of 841 low back pain patients who had been treated with acupunture at our clinic from April, 1992 to March, 1994; 438 males and 403 females, ages ranged from 13 to 93 years with an average age of 48 years.
In the majority of cases, they were treated with low frequency electro-acupuncture (lHz for 15 min.) applied to the para-vertebral muscles.
Clinical diagnosis of subjects were primarily “common low back pain” (40 %), followed by osteoarthritis (10%), sciatica (6%), radiculopathy (5%), herniation (5%), osteoporosis (5%) etc.
Judging from the clinical descriptions in the charts, criteria for clinical responses to treatment was grouped into the following 5 grades; “markedly improved” (chief complaint disappeared), “moderately improved” (improvement of chief complaint continued to next session), “slightly improved” (description of improvement after acupuncture), “poor” and “worsened”
An effectiveness rate of more than 60% was seen in common low back pain (62.2%), sciatica (79.5%), herniation (74.2%) and osteoporosis (64.3%) when a response of “moderately improved” or better was regarded as successful . On the other hand effectiveness rates were lower for lumbar radiculopathy (51.1%) and osteoarthritis (51.6%), 40% for discopathy, 20% for psychogenic and 0% for myelopathy.
Although the aim of this project is to evaluate the efficacy of acupuncture, with respect to design and criteria for assessment this study is weak (e.g., retrospective study; no control group; no objective measures; no standardization of treatment; no quantitative analysis). However, the results suggest that acupuncture is effective not simply in common low back pain, but also in low back and lower extremity pain with neural deficit.
