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Acupuncture does not help women get pregnant - study
Couples who turn to acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine to boost their chances of having a baby are wasting their time, experts said today.
New guidelines from the British Fertility Society (BFS), which represents fertility clinics, said there was "currently no evidence" that the complementary treatments can improve the success of assisted conception.
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They also found nothing to support the use of Chinese herbal remedies to help women get pregnant.
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A leading expert on complementary treatments commenting on the findings said women with fertility problems had been "misled".
The BFS advice followed a systematic review of all reliable published trials looking at acupuncture administered at the same time as fertility treatment.
Information was gathered from a total of 14 studies involving 2,670 patients.
All were published randomised controlled trials which compared patients randomly assigned to receive "real" or "fake" treatments.
Acupuncture is an ancient form of Chinese medicine in which fine needles are inserted into the skin to alter the flow of energy through the body. In a typical treatment, between four and 10 needles are placed along energy channels called "meridians" for 10 to 30 minutes. Needles can be stimulated by manual twirling or with a small electric current.
The BFS experts examined the effect of acupuncture on live births, pregnancies and miscarriages.
They found it did not matter at what stage of In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment it was carried out, acupuncture made no significant difference to any outcomes.
The authors could find no published randomised controlled trials on the effectiveness of using Chinese herbal medicines in conjunction with IVF treatment. They therefore concluded there was no evidence to support the use of these remedies either.
Professor Adam Balen, who chairs the BFS Policy and Practice Committee, said: "The British Fertility Society wants to ensure that all women receive the safest treatment when undergoing fertility procedures, while also maximising their chances that the treatment will be successful.
"Before any treatment can be accepted into mainstream medicine and used on patients, it is essential that it has been tested in randomised controlled trials to ensure that it does actually work and does not cause any harmful side-effects.
"Following a thorough analysis of the evidence, the British Fertility Society concludes that there is currently no evidence that acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine, when used in conjunction with assisted fertility treatment, have any beneficial effect on live birth rate, pregnancy rate or miscarriage rate. Patients should be made aware of this fact before commencing treatment."
He added there was a "great deal of discrepancy" in the way the trials studied were carried out, and the acupuncture techniques used.
"Any future randomised controlled trials in this area need to ensure that they use a standardised acupuncture method, have a large sample size and include adequate controls to account for any placebo effects," he said.
There was no agreement on what constituted a good placebo - or "dummy" treatment - in studies of acupuncture, said the report.
A common method is to use "sham" needles that give a pricking sensation without piercing the skin.
The review, led by Ying Cheong from Princess Anne Hospital in Southampton, is published in the BFS journal Human Fertility.
Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the Peninsula Medical School, based at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth, said: "This is a long-overdue clarification. Infertile women have been misled for some time now to think that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can help them getting pregnant.
"This analysis shows two things very clearly: the totality of the acupuncture trials does not support this notion, and for Chinese herbs, we have no evidence at all. This will help infertile women not to waste their money or get disappointed by TCM practitioners who behave less than responsibly when recommending these treatments."
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