Clinicians in America have found acupuncture to be an acceptable and effective adjunctive technique for reducing pain and anxiety in the hospital accident and emergency department.
In the pilot observational study, retrospective data for 14 months was used to identify 182 patients who had received acupuncture in addition to standard care in the emergency department of Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis. Of these, 52% did not receive painkillers before or during their acupuncture treatment; their average reported decrease in pain was 2.4 points. This compared well with the average 2.8 point pain decrease in those patients who had received painkillers. Additionally though, there was a significant decrease in anxiety scores among the patients who had received acupuncture.
(Acceptability, Adaptation, and Clinical Outcomes of Acupuncture Provided in the Emergency Department: A Retrospective Pilot Study. Pain Medicine, online 25 February 2016.)