Acupuncture or Morphine? What do you Choose?

As someone who participates in acupuncture to manage ulcerative colitis, I welcome the knowledge of additional conditions acupuncture supports.  In this particular study, researchers randomly selected 300 emergency departments and split them into two even groups. The first group was subjected to acupuncture in order to treat their acute pain, while the second group was given morphine.

The results were even better than researchers imagined. Patients who were treated with acupuncture experienced a whopping 92 percent reduction in their pain, while the morphine group experienced a 78 percent reduction. Not only that, the acupuncture group had a much faster pain recovery time. While the morphine group took an average of 28 minutes to recover from their pain, the acupuncture group recovered from their pain in an average of 16 minutes.

So, the alternative treatment was both more effective in reducing pain and faster. So what’s the catch? There doesn’t appear to be one! Not only did acupuncture blow the conventional medical treatment out of the water on those fronts, it also had fewer drawbacks. Of the one in three patients who experienced adverse side effects from the treatment, 57 percent of these were in the morphine group and just 2.6 percent were in the acupuncture group.  Read more here.