While lack of insurance for acupuncture services remains a significant barrier to care, new findings suggest there is cause for optimism. According to a study published in JAMA Network Open,1 the percentage of adult low back pain (LBP) patients with one or more insurance claims filed for acupuncture increased from 0.9% as of 2010 to 1.6% as of 2019.
Average number of annual visits for acupuncture also increased, from 7.6 visits to 8.2 visits. While this may seem like a small increase, it was still deemed statistically significant by the study authors.
Findings were derived from analysis of “Optum’s de-identified Clinformatics DataMart Database, which includes patients with Medicare Advantage and commercial insurance, including employer-sponsored coverage, and contains insurance claims for every reimbursed office visit, procedure, and prescription fill.”
Low back pain claims were determined as the use of ICD-9 code 724.2 for all claims through 2015; and ICD-10 code M54.5 from 2015 onward. Acupuncture claims were determined as the use of CPT codes 97810 and 97811; as well as 97813 / 97814 for electroacupuncture. “Overall, 106 485 patients with LBP (1.6%) had 1 or more acupuncture claim, while 61 503 (0.9%) had 1 or more electroacupuncture claim; 29 217 patients (0.4%) had both an acupuncture and electroacupuncture claim.”
This study is published in an open-access journal; for free full-text access, click here.
Reference
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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