Colic study stirs prickly debate on acupuncture
Excessive crying is known as infantile colic, and a new study suggests that acupuncture may reduce colicky crying when other treatments don’t help. Colicky babies who received acupuncture in the new study appeared to cry less after treatment than those who didn’t receive acupuncture, said Kajsa Landgren, a lecturer in the department of health sciences at Lunds University in Sweden. After the two weeks, the amount of crying that the parents recorded among all of the infants dropped, which the researchers noted in their study was expected, since colic tends to clear up on its own over time. A similar study of 81 infants conducted by Landgren and her colleagues in 2010, published in Acupuncture in Medicine, also found that acupuncture shortened the duration and reduced the intensity of crying in infants with colic. In the study, the researchers noted that many parents of infants who received acupuncture accurately suspected that their baby was in one of the acupuncture groups, moreso than the parents of those not in the acupuncture group.
