Acupuncture for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: An Overview of Systematic Reviews, 2020, Yin et al

Andy

Andy

Senior Member (Voting rights)
FWIW, which in my opinion is very little.
Objective
To evaluate the quality of the existing studies and summarize evidence of important outcomes of meta-analyses/systematic reviews (MAs/SRs) of CFS.

Methods
Potentially eligible studies were searched in the following electronic databases from inception to 1 September, 2019: Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), China Science and Technology Journal Database (VIP), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), WanFang Database (WF), Web of Science, Embase, PubMed and Cochrane Library. Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) was used to evaluate the quality of evidence. The methodological quality of the literature was evaluated by A Measure Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews-2 (AMSTAR-2) and the quality of the report was assessed by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA). The intra-class correlation coefficient was used to assess the consistency of the reviewers, with an overall intraclass correlation coefficient score of 0.967.

Results
Ten MAs/SRs were included. The overall conclusions were that acupuncture had good safety and efficacy in the treatment of CFS, but some of these results were contradictory. The GRADE indicated that out of the 17 outcomes, high-quality evidence was provided in 0 (0%), moderate in 3 (17.65%), low in 10 (58.82%), and very low in 4 (23.53%). The results of AMSTAR-2 showed that the methodological quality of all included studies was critically low. The PRISMA statement revealed that 8 articles (80%) were in line with 20 of the 27-item checklist, and 2 articles (20%) matched with 10–19 of the 27 items.

Conclusion
We found that acupuncture on treating CFS has the advantage for efficacy and safety, but the quality of SRs/MAs of acupuncture for CFS need to be improved.
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Paywall, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11655-020-3195-3
 
I'm curious. Given that ME/CFS can cause widespread problems anywhere throughout the body, in muscles, nerves, bones, organs, which part of the body do the needles get stuck into when using acupuncture?

I've had acupuncture myself, about 20 years ago. In my case it was for a severe shoulder problem - I found the physical movements required in just getting dressed were too painful to tolerate and I had to get help to do it.

The acupuncture I had was carried out by a physiotherapist as a last resort because nothing else was working. The needles were stuck in and near the areas of greatest pain, so at least there was some relationship between the needles and the problem it was trying to fix.

I'm actually quite embarrassed about admitting that I had acupuncture and it helped, because it has such a bad reputation in western medicine. I certainly had no expectation that it would help - I thought it was going to be a complete waste of time and money. (I was seeing the physiotherapist privately.)

But there is no way that my experience of acupuncture for sore shoulders could be compared to using it in ME/CFS, where it doesn't even seem to have any semblance of logic behind it as a treatment.
 
Trish said:
So a systematic review of systematic reviews finds the quality critically low, yet the overall conclusion is that acupuncture is effective and safe...
Huh?
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The quality of systematic reviews is low, therefore more systematic reviews are needed?

That's some logic right there. Not the good kind, but it's definitely some logic. It would be weird even on a movie review: "This movie is terrible, 1/10, but we definitely recommend it". I, uh, what?

I'm genuinely puzzled how Cochrane has the reputation it has or even what purpose it serves given that garbage in garbage out almost seems like a feature. This is borderline satire of how conspiracy theorists imagine this is what scientists do, basically making stuff up to justify more useless work.
 
found this gofund me for a severe ME patient

has found that scalp acupuncture has caused relief of her symptoms. Before starting the acupuncture in January 2020 she was unable to move, hold her phone, speak, chew etc. With the sessions she completed some months ago, she found pain relief and gained a little movement back to her body. Scalp acupuncture is an extremely specialised area of acupuncture which means it's very difficult to find a good practitioner that is able to do home visits. We found such a person and my sister was fortunate enough to have some sessions some months ago but due to the cost (and added cost of having someone come to the home to do it), we can no longer afford the treatments.
Scalp acupuncture is used for neurological disorders of the central nervous system. Most often it is used successfully for Paralysis, Stroke, ME/CFS, Parkinson’s and many more.
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https://www.gofundme.com/f/hannahs-fight-against-severe-me

scalp acupunture is now also called neuroacupuncture.
https://www.neuroacupunctureinstitute.org/treatment/faqs-about-scalp-neuroacupuncture.html
 
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