Acupuncture: Risks and Side Effects

Let's start off with some basics. What exactly does acupuncture do? I think acupuncture is getting more popular. People are more familiar with the use of acupuncture for pain management. Actually, acupuncture can help with some other conditions like anxiety, depression, osteoarthritis, insomnia, and even menstrual cramps. Some studies suggest acupuncture can help with cancer treatment, mostly related to side effects of chemotherapy. But those areas need a larger scale of study to help us understand the actual benefits. Some of the conditions that traditional acupuncture in Chinese medicine claims that they can help with abdominal pain or things like obesity, infertility. But those areas are still new to us, without enough evidence to substantiate what they claim that they can be helpful. In North America, most of the uses for acupuncture would relate to pain management, and some of these other domains are areas that require more study. Are there any risks or side effects with getting acupuncture treatment? The risk of acupuncture is low. If you have a competent, certified acupuncture practitioner using single disposable needles, infection, in fact, is the number one adverse event of acupuncture documented in the literature. The next one is often puncture, like lung puncture causing pneumothorax. Common side effects include soreness and milder breathing at the location where the needle is inserted to. Nowadays, everyone uses a single disposable needle, so infection is much lesser incidence, but we still hear here and there is some problem. Some other conditions that we need to be careful of is for people who have a blood bleeding disorder or taking blood thinner, certain acupuncture points, like intraarticular acupuncture points, they have to be careful when they insert or try to avoid those points. Pacemakers, for sure, if we are using electroacupuncture, that could cause interference. If a young lady is expecting a baby, then again, certain points could affect the cause of the pregnancy that we should afford to. Sounds like it would be important with a few conditions, as you mentioned, like a bleeding disorder or having a pacemaker, that you should definitely discuss that with the person who's going to perform the acupuncture in advance. And we should screen properly before we actually apply the needle. Just to recap too, while the number one side effect historically might have been infection related to needles, it sounds like with single-use disposable needles, that's really much less of an issue right now. We still hear from situations, for example, in a clinic, the acupuncture treatment combined with massage. So acupuncture is safe, but what happens is the skin doesn't close fast enough and the person went for massage therapy after. That actually opened the possibility that the massage oil that was sweating from the sun could cause some trouble.