Acupuncture for Low Back Pain in Pregnancy

Abstract

Medical doctors are particularly cautious about using acupuncture in pregnancy. This derives from the mostly historical and anecdotal claims that acupuncture can promote abortion, coupled with the fact that spontaneous early pregnancy loss is common, and litigation is increasing. This case report describes the circumstances that lead to the author using deep paraspinal and periosteal acupuncture throughout a patient's pregnancy to help control her low back pain.

Adverse event reporting in studies of penetrating acupuncture during pregnancy: a systematic review

“…A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) diagram [24] (Figure 1) identifies the different stages of the selection process. Seventeen studies [3][4][5][6][7][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] were included (Table 1) and systematically reviewed.…”

“…Thirteen studies used an RCT design [3-7, 25, 27-30, 32, 34, 36]; three employed a case study design [26,31,33], and another used a retrospective cohort design [35]. Five studies included women within the first trimester [4,6,25,26,34].…”

“…Thirteen studies used an RCT design [3-7, 25, 27-30, 32, 34, 36]; three employed a case study design [26,31,33], and another used a retrospective cohort design [35]. Five studies included women within the first trimester [4,6,25,26,34]. One author (da Silva) was the first named on four studies [5,7,27,28], and two authors were first named on two articles, Elden [29,30] and Ternov, who was also cited as Kvorning [32,35].…”

“…Five studies gave vague depths: "classical acupuncture depth" [5,28], "traditional depth" [7,27] and "standard depth" [6]. Six studies described the depth needled in either centimeters or millimeters and gave it as a range [4,25,26,29,30,34].…”

“…Eight studies gave an incomplete description of the number and dimensions of the needles used [3,25,26,29,30,32,33,35], and only one study did not report information on needle retention time [32].…”