Acupuncture and TCM Articles

Acupuncture & TCM Articles

Acupuncture Effective for Depression in Women

New research suggests that acupuncture may be an effective treatment for depression in women A new pilot study by psychologist John Allen of The University of Arizona in Tucson and Tucson acupuncturist Rosa Schnyer suggests that acupuncture may prove to be at least as effective in the treatment of depression as psychotherapy or drug therapy. Allen and Schnyers' work, appearing in this month's issue of the journal Psychological Science, represents the first scientifically controlled study of the efficacy of acupuncture in the treatment of depression in the Western literature.

"I would say that there is sufficient evidence for people with depression to be hopeful," says Allen, an associate professor in the psychology department at the UA, "but I wish to highlight that this is a small study that needs larger replication."

The double-blind study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine, compared the reduction of major depression in three groups of women. For eight weeks the first group of women received specific acupuncture therapy for depression. The second group received acupuncture treatment for symptoms not associated with depression. The final group was put on a wait-list.

Women in the two groups that received acupuncture therapy were not informed of which treatment group they belonged, and the treating acupuncturists (who did not design the treatments) perceived that they were treating real symptoms in all cases. The raters who assessed the subjects' degree of depression before and after the trial were also blind to the treatment conditions of individual subjects.

At the end of eight weeks, Allen and co-workers found that the women who received specific acupuncture treatment for depression were significantly less depressed than the women who received acupuncture treatment for symptoms not related to depression.

In addition, there was a non-significant trend in reduction of depression for women in the specific acupuncture treatment group versus women in the wait list group. "Even though statistically speaking we can't rule out that that result is due to chance," says Allen, "we have all of the indications based on the size of the difference and the direction of the difference to think that our treatment effect is of comparable magnitude to existing studies (of traditional treatments)".

Allen cites the commonness of depression and the failure of traditional medicine as reasons for exploring the efficacy of alternative treatments.

"If you factor in the number of people who don't get well in response to traditional Western treatments for depression" says Allen, "and then add the people who drop out of treatment before getting well, one half of the people who start treatment do not get well during the typical course of treatment ". Allen suggests that alternative treatments may be welcomed by a number of people because they may have different side-effect profiles or they might be more consistent with a person's views or beliefs about what might impact their depression.

In fact, a lot of people use alternative treatments. In a large-scale study by Harvard Medical School published in the New England Journal of Medicine depression was among the most frequently-reported conditions, and one of the top five conditions for which people were more likely to seek alternative treatments, with or without established treatments, over established treatments alone. Acupuncture was one of the alternative treatments listed in the study.

Another potential advantage of treating depression with acupuncture is the flexibility of Chinese medicine for treating a variety of individual symptoms.

"Depression is very heterogeneous," says Allen, "there are literally a thousand different ways that someone can appear when depressed. We don't have a good way, in the West, to sort out a person's particular configuration and say that they are going to need and respond to a particular drug."

According to Allen, Chinese medicine provides a framework for the treatment of a variety of symptoms that are all lumped together and called "depression". From the perspective of a Chinese medical examiner, each person has a different configuration of symptoms and that means a different pattern of disharmony which implies a different treatment.

"According to Chinese medicine," says Allen, "acupuncture achieves its effects by altering the flow of energy along various energetic meridians. Western scientists, however, haven't identified meridians... and this explanation does not neatly map onto our Western understanding of physiology and psychology. Our data suggest that the particular points used, which are derived from this framework of Chinese medicine, clearly influence the outcome. Such findings are supportive of, but not definitive proof of, an energetic explanation for the improvement we observed. Of course we've learned enough times in the history of medicine and technology that, just because a treatment works, doesn't mean that it works for the reasons we think it does. We clearly need to conduct further investigations."

Allen suggests if Western scientists and Eastern scientists were to team-up, maybe they could learn each others' language.

"I think studies like this are the first step in promoting that kind of inter-disciplinary investigation. But before we move on to attempt to understand how acupuncture works to treat depression, we must first establish that it does work, in a carefully controlled study that respects both Western scientific methods, and the principles of Chinese medicine."

Allen and Schyner are currently funded by NIH for a larger scale clinical trial of the efficacy of acupuncture in treating depression.