Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a degenerative joint disease and is presented as pain, swelling, stiffness, and dysfunction. The chronic knee pain can seriously affect the quality of patient lives. Pain killers can reduce pain and alter the disease progression, but it has many adverse side effects.
Acupuncture can effectively reduce arthritic knee pain without side effects. This is proved by research. For example, A paper analysed eleven randomised clinical trials CTs with 2484 patients with knee arthritis. The meta-analysis indicated that acupuncture had beneficial effect on knee osteoarthritis in reducing pain and improved patients function activities. They conclude that acupuncture has beneficial effect on pain relief and improves function activities, and this treatment can be recommended as a beneficial alternative therapy in patients with KOA, particularly for chronic patients and those currently undergoing long-term pain and help them increasing quality of life. Another paper studied the effect of acupuncture on 625 patients with knee arthritis. The result has shown that pain was significantly reduced in acupuncture group compared with waiting-list control group. Another paper analysed 9 trials with 724 patients with knee arthritis. The result has shown that acupuncture effectively reduced knee pain.
References
Hao Tian et al Biomed Res Int. 2022: 6561633.
Jiali Liu et al Chin Med. 2022; 17: 67.
Xingzhen Lin et al Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Feb 25; 101(8): e28838.
