CANCER RELATED PAIN
Acupuncture can assist in pain management in a number of ways:
Reducing inflammation - for joint pains, muscle pains and tumour-related pains
Assisting in wound healing - for post-operative pain
Reducing amount of the pain messages sent to the brain - for all types of pain
Reducing stress and improving sleep - shown to help with pain relief
Safe with very little side-effects
Medication free and does not interfere with cancer treatment
A major report by Chiu (2017) looking at acupuncture treating cancer related pain covered 36 trials and 2200 participants. It concluded that:
“Acupuncture significantly reduced cancer-related pain, particularly malignancy-related or surgery-induced pain. Our findings suggest that acupuncture can be adopted as part of a multimodal approach for reducing cancer-related pain. ”
Chiu HY, Hsieh YJ, Tsai PS Systematic Review and meta-analysis of acupuncture to reduce cancer-related pain European Journal of Cancer, 2017, 26, e12457, doi:10.1111/ecc.12457