However, if I were in a lot of pain and it helped some that would be awesome. I would probably try it to see if it worked for me. This CNN link sums up the JAMA Internal Medicine study you have linked to:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/11/health/health-acupuncture/
Snip> "Acupuncture does appear to have some very small benefit above and beyond placebo acupuncture or sham acupuncture," says Avins, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "But the effects really are pretty small, and the majority of the effect is a placebo effect."
Acupuncture skeptics will likely seize on this point, Avins says, but the study findings don't mean that acupuncture doesn't work, or that doctors shouldn't refer pain patients for the treatment.
Acupuncture, he suggests, should perhaps be viewed as a way of providing modest pain relief while also harnessing the placebo effect.
"In the past, people have viewed placebos as negative things, (but) they could have some real benefits for patients," Avins says. "I would be hard-pressed to tell a patient who says they're benefiting from something that's 'just a placebo' to stop using it."
End quote.
To be clear the difference beyond the placebo was so insignificant in the study many scientists didn't think it proved there was anything beyond a placebo. It was the difference of 0.5 on a 0-10 scale:
Snip> What Vickers et al are arguing is that a change of 5 on a 0-100 pain scale (which would be a change of 0.5 on a 0-10 pain scale), a subjective scale, is noticeable by patients. It’s probably not.
Here’s a hint: -5 (the difference between sham acupuncture and “real” acupuncture) is not clinically significant. The only way you can even approach clinical significance is to compare no-acupuncture controls versus acupuncture, in which case you’re adding placebo effects into any other effect observed, even if that effect is real (which I highly doubt it to be). Indeed, Vickers et al labor mightily to try to convince readers that this tiny effect, if it exists, is not just statistically significant, but clinically significant. They doth protest too much, methinks. In fact, I very much like how the grand master of the scientific analysis of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), Edzard Ernst, put it:
Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, said the study “impressively and clearly” showed that the effects of acupuncture were mostly due to placebo. “The differences between the results obtained with real and sham acupuncture are small and not clinically relevant. Crucially, they are probably due to residual bias in these studies. Several investigations have shown that the verbal or non-verbal communication between the patient and the therapist is more important than the actual needling. If such factors would be accounted for, the effect of acupuncture on chronic pain might disappear completely.”
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/09/12/can-we-finally-just-say-that-acupuncture-is-nothing-more-than-an-elaborate-placebo-can-we-2012-edition/
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