The Importance of Measuring Context in the Study Whole Person Health: Healing and Persistence of Clinical Effect in Acupuncture Science

The last 50 years we have seen an increase in published biomedical science on acupuncture, how it works and for which conditions. Our analysis considers if persistence of treatment effect may be related to continued treatment after study completion. Our data comes from a completed Army-funded Randomized Controlled Trial "The Effectiveness of Acupuncture in the Treatment of Gulf War Illness (Army grant W81XWH-09-2-0064)". This pragmatic RCT applied acupuncture treatment in a therapeutically informed dose determined in focus groups with expert practitioners. We followed the advice of the practitioners and designed a treatment protocol of Individualized acupuncture treatments administered by practitioners in the community for a possible treatment window of 6 months. Using data from our focus groups we designed the study to compare the dose that our acupuncture focus group experts told us would be necessary for effect (twice per week) to once per week treatment. Treatment protocols individualized or personalized to the patient are standard of care in acupuncture therapy. Put another way, a standardized treatment protocol was not used; instead experienced licensed practitioners were given training in the known medical information of GWI, and encouraged to treat with discretion while keeping detailed treatment records. The Importance of Measuring Context to Study Whole Person Health: Healing and Persistence of Clinical Effect in Acupuncture Science