“The human body wants to get rid of the foreign object,” Guermazi said. “It starts with some mechanism of defense, for example inflammation and forming [fibrous tissue] around the object.”
Needles left in the body can lead to other challenges, too. “The patient can’t go into an MRI because needles left in the body may move, and damage an artery,” Guermazi said.
Little evidence supports the idea that treating medical conditions with acupuncture actually works. Yet, the practice is widely used as a treatment for painful joints, and the insertion of pieces of sterile gold threads around the joint is a common treatment for arthritis in Asian countries, according to the new report.
In the US, an estimated 3.1 million U.S. adults and 150,000 children were treated with acupuncture in 2007, according to a survey by the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
