Acupuncture relieves pain and improves daily function in people with sciatica better than a sham acupuncture treatment that looks and feels very similar, a clinical trial suggests.
For the new trial, published Monday (Oct. 14) in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers recruited 220 people with sciatica, a condition that causes pain, weakness, tingling or numbness in the lower half of the body. These sensations are caused by pressure on or damage to the sciatic nerve, the largest nerve in the body; in this case, all of the patients had herniated disks that drove their sciatica.
