Basically,It's good news for general back pain suffers

Backache sufferers will receive acupuncture on the NHS as a result of official guidance being issued this week on how to treat the debilitating condition. Doctors will be told to offer those suffering from back pain courses of complementary therapies costing the NHS at least £400 per person. £33.6m will be saved by stopping the practice of injecting therapeutic substances into people's backs and £13.2m from reducing the number of sufferers sent for an MRI scan or X-ray.

It seems nothing bad,but something you may not know....

1)About 19 in 20 cases of acute (sudden onset) low back pain are classed as 'simple low back pain'.Most bouts of simple low back pain improve quickly, usually within a week or so. In about 3 in 4 cases, the pain has either gone or has greatly eased within four weeks. In about 9 in 10 cases the pain has gone or has greatly eased within six weeks. So,Medication,acupuncture,physiotherapy....almost every treatment can help this simple back pain.

2)An estimated 7% go on to develop a chronic form of the condition, which in the worst cases can lead to immobility and inability to work.Less than 1 in 20 cases are nerve root pain,which means that a nerve coming from the spinal cord is irritated or pressed on.you may feel pain down a leg to the calf or foot, and the pain in the leg or foot is often worse than the pain in the back. It seems not many people like this,but most chronic back pain suffers with this pain are maily visitors in GP surgery .Can acupuncture help this? It depend on causes of back or leg pain. if the cause of the irritation or pressure on a nerve is due to inflammation caused by a ligament or muscle sprain,Acupuncture can help a lot,but It's hard to get rid of chronic injuries with general acupuncture. In current Chinese acupuncture practice,deep and intensive acupuncture are getting more an more popular. A 'slipped disc' is another well known cause,but slipped disc doesn't means have to pain.Nomally only inflamed disc area can lead to pain.Can acupuncture help? It depends on the location of the inflammation. Inflammation is the main cause of back pain. Acupuncture works well in the case where the inflammation is outside of the spinal cord. *** Acupuncture does not work in the case where the inflammation is inside the spinal cord. So,I suggest that patient do not rush into acupuncture without professional examination.

3)Less common causes of low back pain, for example: arthritis,Ankylosing spondylitis,Rheumatoid arthritis ,bone disorders, tumours, infections..etc. Acupuncture doesn't work very well.

So ANY BACK PAIN= ACUPUNCTURE=PAIN RELIEF

Professor David Colquhoun, research fellow in pharmacology at University College London, and a leading opponent of the alternative medicine industry, said:"We will not only be subsidising an industry of acupuncturists and chiropractors, but worse still spending money setting up standards and regulation of something which I do not believe the evidence supports," Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Acupuncture have very good quality research in China,It's a sham,there are havn't enough translation of those research.Many new developed acupuncture techniques didn't be recommend to west country practice.Because there is no anatomical basis for the existence of the meridians, and no new technique research,the concept clashes with Western medicine.

In addition, we have copious amounts of clinical evidence to show that acupuncture remedies simply work.But some research also showed there was no acupuncture that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo.

So someone may ask;why would a regulatory body whose job it is to protect the public from false claims for medical products allow acupuncture to claim an effect when the science clearly shows no effect? and there are interesting comment I quote from SFGATE

Chi whiz - just stop boozing

Editor - The headline above this story reads "Alternative Medicine" ("Alternative Medicine: Acupuncture for the last-call crowd," Monday). What's that? Either something is medicine or it is not medicine. "An alternative to medicine" would be an accurate way to characterize acupuncture.

Acupuncture has not been shown to be any more effective than fake acupuncture (placebo). If a patient is drinking unhealthy amounts of alcoholic beverages, the responsible thing for a real health care provider to do would be to encourage the patient to drink less.

If the mono-monikered Fraggle really believes he feels pain in his liver, he needs to get competent medical advice. By the way, the liver does not have pain sensors.

Well, at least I now know what force makes the Earth turn round. It's chi: You can see it, but you can't hold it in a box because the box has its own chi. Got that?

- Michael Schaffer, San Francisco

Reason is acupuncture really work!

But, Acupuncture isn't for every back pain, it is unclear when patients will be able to routinely access the treatments on the NHS and if the NHS will pay for patients to visit private practitioners for treatment.