Acupuncture to treat sleep apnea? Has anyone tried?

Hi all,

I found a bunch of links on the Internet regarding acupuncture to treat sleep apnea:

http://sleepapnea.org/treat/treatment-o ... cture.html
http://www.acupunctureforsleepapnea.com/

I was curious if anyone here has tried acupuncture and what the results were.

Thanks!

Franck-

It helped peripheral neuropathy. Not sure how it would work for OSA but it works for many things.

My understanding is that acupuncture can make your throat muscles more firm and reduce the amount of "collapse" and obstruction during sleep.

I'll mention it next time I go and give it a try. Thanks.

I would try it if it wasn't so expensive; but at this point I'm willing to try anything. The "hang on its worth it" mantra just doesn't cut it after 11 months of this.

I have a hard time giving any merit to a study with such a small sample size when only five subjects in the treatment group remained after seven dropped out. I'm unimpressed.

KatyDidAgain wrote:I have a hard time giving any merit to a study with such a small sample size when only five subjects in the treatment group remained after seven dropped out. I'm unimpressed.

I think each group was 12 people and one person dropped out of the treated group so 11 were left. From these 11, 60% (I guess 6 or 7 people out of 11) had their AHI reduced by half and another 20% (I guess 2-3 people out of 11) significantly reduced. It's promising but yes the group was definitely too small to consider this scientifically accurate.

I misread. I'm still unimpressed. Eleven subjects is nothing to write home about. At best, it warrants further study, not publication. There was no followup to see if the treatment lasted for any significant length of time.

Acupuncture has never been proven to *cure* anything. There is little evidence to support that acupuncture provides any more than temporary relief (mostly to those with chronic pain conditions and migraines). Combine the cost of treatment with the necessity to receive ongoing treatments and it is not worth it unless you have money to blow. CPAP remains the gold-standard for SA treatment.

But that's what you get with "alternative medicine". They have to call it alternative because it isn't actually medicine.

And, to be clear, I don't mean any of that in a derogatory way. I mean that it saddens me that desperate people will fall for this nonsense.

Back to that study, it was simply randomized, not double-blind. To me the results are basically meaningless. YMMV