Therapeutic effects of acupuncture plus fire needle versus acupuncture alone in lateral epicondylitis

Abstract

Background: The aim of this study was to compare the short-term and intermediate-term efficacy of acupuncture plus fire needle therapy with that of acupuncture alone in the treatment of lateral epicondylitis (LE). Methods: Thirty-eight patients with LE who had persisted for at least 2 months were enrolled in this prospective, assessor-blinded, randomized controlled pilot trial. Twenty-one patients were randomized to the acupuncture plus fire needle group and 17 to the acupuncture-only group. The primary outcome was the visual analog scale pain score for the previous 24 hours and the secondary outcomes were the maximum grip strength, Patient-rated Forearm Evaluation Questionnaire score, and Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short-form Health Survey score. The values at baseline (pretreatment), at the end of treatment, and at 3 months after treatment were used to assess the short-term and intermediate-term effects of treatment. The data were analyzed using the Chi-square test and t test. Results: Within-group analyses showed better results for acupuncture plus fire needle therapy in the short term and intermediate term. Differences in the severity of pain and secondary outcomes were significant in the intermediate term in the acupuncture group. At the end of treatment, none of the differences in outcome scores were significant, except for maximum grip strength in the affected hand in the acupuncture group. No significant between-group differences in short-term or intermediate-term outcomes were observed. Conclusion: Acupuncture plus fire needle therapy was effective in the short term in patients seeking improvement of LE. Twelve treatments were effective for relieving pain and improving disability in the intermediate term in patients with chronic LE in both study groups. The findings of the pilot study confirm the feasibility of proceeding to a larger randomized controlled study of the longer-term effects of acupuncture plus fire needle therapy in patients with LE.

A Systematic Review of Acupuncture for Tennis Elbow

“…In 1 study [23], the elctroacupuncture treatment showed a statistically significant difference in all items pre and post treatment, and had excellent beneficial effect. In another study [16], burning acupuncture showed no statistically significant differences in the treatment group compared with the control group, so it was reported that there need to be additional research. In 1 study [22], bee venom pharmoacopuncture showed no statistically significant difference in increasing grip strength pre-and post-treatment, but it was perceived by patients to be statistically significantly more effective than acupuncture.…”

“…1). There were 9 RCTs [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and 18 [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] case reports included in the review. The main characteristics of these studies was presented in tables (Tables 2 and 3).…”

“…There were 9 RCTs [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], with the highest frequency of treatment sessions in RCTs being 10 sessions [17,20,24], followed by 6 sessions [18,22,23]. There was 1 study with 12 sessons of treatment [16]. In 1 study [21], there were between 7-10 treatment sessions (the exact count was not reported).…”

“…In the RCTs, the most used intervention was acupuncture which was used in 6 studies [17][18][19]21,24], followed by electroacupuncture which was used in 2 study cases [20,23], with burning acupuncture [16], and bee venom pharmacopuncture [22] used in 1 study.…”

“…Numeric rating scale (NRS) was used as a pain evaluation index in 4 case reports [25,26,37,36]. Grip strength was used in 6 RCTs [16,18,20,[22][23][24] and 7 case reports [25,27,28,32,34,37,38]. In addition to these evaluation (I/C, Baseline→after 6th treatment within 2 weeks) 1) PVAS (%): 100→50/100→68 (p = 0.000) 2) PFGS: Improvement was shown in both group (p = 0.045) → EA is superior to MA.…”