The Institute for Economic Review, "an independent, nonprofit research organization that evaluates medical evidence and convenes public deliberative bodies to help stakeholders interpret and apply evidence to improve patient outcomes and control costs," has announced that adequate evidence supports payer coverage of acupuncture to manage chronic low back pain in conjunction with usual care.
The announcement is based on the ICER's Final Evidence Report, which determined acupuncture and other therapies (yoga, cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction) offer benefits without the clear risks associated with conventional medical management (opioids and surgery).
The ICER recruited researchers to study whether acupuncture, among other methods, offered adequate benefits to be regarded as a covered insurance benefit. The Final Evidence Report was prepared for the California Technical Assessment Forum, a core program of the ICER that "provides a public venue in which the evidence on the effectiveness and value of health care services can be discussed with the input of all stakeholders."
Following a public meeting, the CTAF Panel voted on the report, including 14-0 in the affirmative when posed this question: "For individuals with chronic low back pain, is the evidence adequate to demonstrate that acupuncture provides additional net health benefit when added to usual care?"
"Unfortunately, even in the face of an opioid epidemic, many patients are not offered these alternative types of pain management," said ICER Chief Medical Officer David Rind, MD, MSc. "Stakeholders, particularly payers, should work to ensure that patients are able to access a broad range of evidence-based non-drug interventions with at least as much ease as they are able to access pharmacologic treatments."
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
| Digital Exclusive
One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
| Digital Exclusive