Acupuncture and Xerostomia: A Study Round-Up

Last week, I went over two large and conclusive studies that showed acupuncture is effective in treating the symptoms of chemotherapy-induced dry mouth (or xerostomia). And there’s a lot more where that came from.

This week, I’m going to go over the findings of a survey study published in June 2015 in Medical Acupuncture that aggregates the results of a number of previous acupuncture/xerostomia studies. As you’ve probably guessed, the findings are very positive.

184 articles put under a magnifying glass

Researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the United States Air Force Acupuncture Center in Maryland searched through Embase, Medline,® Cochrane (all databases), PubMed, and Scopu for viable articles. They identified 184 published articles that evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture on xerostomia (as you can see, it’s a very popular topic). After some rigorous screening for test methods and accuracy of reporting, only six studies met all inclusion criteria.

Of these six studies, four had very positive findings in favor of acupuncture as an effective treatment for xerostomia in cancer patients. These studies reported significant differences between the treatments of cancer patients receiving real acupuncture and control groups. The other two studies reported significant differences only between patients receiving real acupuncture and those receiving fake acupuncture.

Simple Conclusions

The survey findings are conclusive: acupuncture is a helpful treatment for dry mouth in patients with head and neck cancer. Large “phase III” trials that seek to further investigate the pathways of acupuncture’s effectiveness are currently underway.

Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years to effectively treat all kinds of disease, but only in the past century has science proven its worth. Next month, I’ll go over how acupuncture can be an effective treatment for lymphadema.