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| Allergy Fast Facts |
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Acupuncture
Nasal allergies are common in children, and appear to be getting more common all the time. In Chinese medicine, acupuncture is often used to treat allergies. People report great results, but there have not been many scientific studies to verify whether this really works.
Recently, researchers evaluated a group of school-age children with chronic allergies. Half of the children received 2 sessions a week of acupuncture for 8 weeks; the other half got pretend acupuncture. In the real acupuncture group, needles were inserted to a depth of 1.2 to 2.4 cm and the needles were rotated gently every 5 minutes over a twenty minute period in order to achieve 'qi'. For the pretend acupuncture treatments, real needles were used by real acupuncturists at real acupuncture points, but the needles were only inserted 0.3 cm, and they were not rotated -- in order to avoid 'qi'. The children, the parents, and the people evaluating the allergy symptoms didn't know which children were getting real acupuncture.
The results were published in the November 2004 Pediatrics. Those who got real acupuncture had better allergy symptom scores and more symptom-free days, both during the treatment period and during the months that followed. The effect lasted for about 10 weeks after the treatments ended -- about a season. Interestingly, when asked what they liked, the kids in the study preferred oral medicines to acupuncture needles, but preferred acupuncture twice a week to commonly prescribed daily steroid nasal sprays. Parents preferred acupuncture to medicines for treating their children.
Homeopathy
True homeopathic or "like cures like" remedies are often criticized by allopathic physicians because the remedies are so dilute that no molecules of the active ingredients remain. Advocates of homeopathy reply that the homeopathic remedies retain some sort of memory of the active ingredients even after they have gone, in much the same way that a soft pillow can recall the shape of a head even after the person has left.
I applaud the gentleness of homeopathy. Do any of the remedies really work? Or are they all just placebos? The highly respected British Medical Journal contains a fascinating study in the August 19-26, 2000 issue. In a carefully controlled, rigorously scientific, yet small, study of 50 allergy sufferers, a homeopathic preparation for nasal allergies reduced symptoms by 28%, while a placebo reduced symptoms by only 3%. We have much to learn from the intersection of conventional science and homeopathy, but these results suggest that this may be a very fruitful area to explore.
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Reviewed By: Alan Greene, M.D., F.A.A.P., Department of Pediatrics, Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford University School of Medicine; Chief Medical Officer, A.D.A.M., Inc., and Jacqueline A. Hart, M.D., Department of Internal Medicine, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Boston, Ma.
