The first ever safety study of government funded acupuncture clinics in the UK found that while acupuncture is generally safe, it’s not risk-free, as some practitioners insist. Investigators searched a national monitoring database for reports of adverse effects (AE) involving acupuncture from 2009 through 2011.
They found about three hundred AEs, most of which were mild, but some of which were surprisingly serious – like collapsed lungs and forgotten needles that had to be surgically removed!
You’d have to be crazy to believe that any undertaking that involves needles and human beings could be 100% risk-free. Let this be a pointed reminder that 50% of the people in every profession are below average:
Some of the reports were merely of sloppy practice. In 100 cases, patients were left with needles still in them, sometimes hours longer than intended or even after they or the staff went home. Some needles subsequently had to be surgically removed.
Of the 325 adverse reports, 309 were rated as involving little or no harm. This included 162 people experiencing dizziness and fainting when the needle was inserted.
Five people experienced lung collapse, or pneumothorax, caused by the needle puncturing the pleural membranes around the lung.
The fact that only one of these collapses was reported as “severe” – and one was listed as “no harm” even though lung collapse can be fatal – rings alarm bells for Edzard Ernst of the University of Exeter, a leading expert on the evidence-based evaluation of alternative medicine, who helped conduct the study.
The abstract of the study doesn’t say how many people received acupuncture through the NHS during the study period, so we don’t know the rate of adverse events. It’s probably very low in absolute terms, given the popularity of accupuncture in the NHS.
The authors don’t say, at least in the abstract, whether the rate of adverse events is high enough to suggest systematic problems with the training or certification of NHS acupuncturists. Any profession can have a few rank incompetents, even if the certification process is sound, but if serious preventable AEs are cropping up on a regular basis, that might mean that the system isn’t doing enough to train and screen providers.
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