There's not a cure available, so patients are often left somewhat frustrated by continuing pain and fatigue. Acupuncture is one of the few things shown to be effective for these symptoms. It may be particularly attractive to patients who are unable to take medications because of intolerable side effects. |
This doesn't surprise me, as we see this pattern in other chronic pain problems: you can relieve pain, but it's a lot harder to prompt activity changes. A chronically ill person needs more than symptom relief to resume a normal lifestyle. We're now beginning to work on that problem. |
This was critical, because this had been a shortcoming of other previous studies with acupuncture - the simulated acupuncture treatments were not believable to the patients. |
We expected the acupuncture to improve the pain. We didn't really expect the largest benefit to be in fatigue or anxiety. |