Acupuncture and moxibustion for lateral elbow pain: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Gadau M, Yeung WF, Liu H, Zaslawski C, Tan YS, Wang FC, et al · BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies · 2014 April 12

DOI 10.1186/1472-6882-14-136

Objective

Acupuncture and moxibustion have widely been used to treat lateral elbow pain (LEP). A comprehensive systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) including both English and Chinese databases was conducted to assess the efficacy of acupuncture and moxibustion in the treatment of LEP.

Conclusions

This systematic review showcase that acupuncture shows significantly results with lateral elbow pain. The treatment reduced frequency of local anesthetic injection, local steroid injection and non-steroidal anti- inflammatory drugs. Overall, patients reported to have improved quality of life after receiving treatments.

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Insights

Moderate quality studies suggest that acupuncture is more effective than sham acupuncture for lateral elbow pain.

All studies had at least one domain rated as high risk or uncertain risk of bias in the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Results from three RCTs of moderate quality showed that acupuncture was more effective than sham acupuncture. Results from 10 RCTs of mostly low quality showed that acupuncture or moxibustion was superior or equal to conventional treatment, such as local anesthetic injection, local steroid injection, non-steroidal anti- inflammatory drugs, or ultrasound. There were six low quality RCTs that compared acupuncture and moxibustion combined with manual acupuncture alone, and all showed that acupuncture and moxibustion combined was superior to manual acupuncture alone.