Despite increasing public and professional awareness, national guidelines from multiple health care organizations, and an overall trend favoring nondrug therapies before medication, the numbing numbers still stand out: an estimated 130 deaths a day due to an opioid overdose. Could the solution be as simple as visiting an acupuncturist first? In the case of low back pain, the answer is a resounding yes, according to a new national study.
Published in BMJ Open, this study evaluated short- and long-term opioid use based on initial provider type seen: conservative care provider (acupuncturist, chiropractor, physical therapist) or primary care medical physician (PCP).* Study participants included more than 215,000 U.S. adults diagnosed with new-onset low back pain and "opioid naive."
The study defined early opioid use as "an opioid fill within 30 days of the index visit" and long-term use as "an initial opioid fill within 60 days of the index date and either 120 or more days' supply of opioids over 12 months, or 90 days or more supply of opioids and 10 or more opioid prescriptions over 12 months."
Researchers evaluated inpatient and outpatient claims from patient visits and pharmacy claims to correlate first provider type seen with opioid use, finding that LBP patients whose initial visit was with an acupuncturist were a staggering 91 percent less likely to use opioids early compared to patients who saw a PCP first.
Significantly reduced odds for early opioid use were also noted for chiropractic patients and physical therapy patients, although not as significant as for acupuncture patients. LBP patients who first visited an acupuncturist or other conservative provider were also less likely to use opioids long term compared with patients visiting a PCP. Click here for free access to the entire study.
*ER physicians, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons and rehab physicians were also included. Patients visiting any of the above first also had lower odds of early opioid use vs. PCPs (although not as significant as visiting a conservative-care provider), with the exception of ER physicians (dramatically higher odds). However, odds for long-term use were not significantly different compared to PCPs, with the exception of rehab physicians (still significantly lower).
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.
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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?
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