Acupuncture treatment appears to be safe for those who are under 18, with very little risk involved when qualified practitioners are wielding the needles, although there may be minor side effects in a small number of cases, a study said.
Acupuncture is used as an alternative therapy for a range of conditions including pain, headaches and constipation, but few large, long-term studies until now have examined either its effectiveness or its safety in youngsters.
“Based on the available evidence, in trained hands, acupuncture is safe for children,” said University of Alberta pediatrics professor Sunita Vohra, who worked on the study.
Serious side effects were rare and likely to be caused by substandard practice, researchers said in a report in Pediatrics.
The study reviewed 37 other studies, ranging from randomized trials that compared side effects with acupuncture and other treatments to single reports of acupuncture illness and injury.
“We calculated a mild adverse incidence per patient of 168 in 1,422 patients, or 11.8 percent,” the researchers said.
“Mild” side effects included things such as pain, bruising, bleeding or worsening of symptoms.
“Of the adverse events associated with pediatric needle acupuncture, a majority of them were mild in severity. Many of the serious adverse events might have been caused by substandard practice,” the researchers wrote.
Among them was a case of a 17-year-old French boy who was diagnosed with HIV after acupuncture treatment for tendonitis, as well as 12 thumb deformities at one Chinese center in the 1980s.
“There’s some pretty unusual circumstances. Those sorts of things don’t really seem to happen now under modern-day circumstances,” Vohra said.
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