New research suggests that acupuncture may be an effective treatment for healing depression in women. A new pilot study by psychologist John Allen of The University of Arizona in Tucson and Tucson acupuncturist Rosa Schnyer suggests that acupuncture may prove to be at least as effective in the treatment of depression as psychotherapy or drug therapy.

Allen and Schnyers' work represents the first scientifically controlled study of the healing efficacy of acupuncture in the treatment of depression in the Western literature. The double-blind study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine, compared the reduction of major depression in three groups of women. For eight weeks the first group of women received specific acupuncture therapy for depression. The second group received acupuncture treatment for symptoms not associated with depression. The final group was put on a wait-list. Women in the two groups that received acupuncture therapy were not informed of which treatment group they belonged, and the treating acupuncturists (who did not design the treatments) perceived that they were treating real symptoms in all cases. The raters who assessed the subjects' degree of depression before and after the trial were also blind to the treatment conditions of individual subjects.

At the end of eight weeks, Allen and co-workers found that the women who received specific acupuncture treatment for depression were significantly less depressed than the women who received acupuncture treatment for symptoms not related to depression.

In addition, there was a non-significant trend in reduction of depression for women in the specific acupuncture treatment group versus women in the wait list group. "Even though statistically speaking we can't rule out that result is due to chance," says Allen, "we have all of the indications based on the size of the difference and the direction of the difference to think that our treatment effect is of comparable magnitude to existing studies (of traditional treatments)".

Allen cites the commonness of depression and the failure of traditional medicine as reasons for exploring the efficacy of alternative treatments. "If you factor in the number of people who don't get well in response to traditional Western treatments for depression" says Allen, "and then add the people who drop out of treatment before getting well, one half of the people who start treatment do not get well during the typical course of treatment."

In a large-scale study by Harvard Medical School published in the New England Journal of Medicine, depression was among the most frequently-reported conditions, and one of the top five conditions for which people were more likely to seek alternative treatments, with or without established treatments, over established treatments alone. Acupuncture was one of the alternative treatments listed in the study.

From the perspective of a Chinese medical examiner, each person has a different configuration of symptoms and that means a different pattern of disharmony which implies a different treatment. According to Chinese medicine, acupuncture achieves its effects by altering the flow of energy along various energetic meridians. Western scientists, however, haven't identified meridians, and this explanation does not neatly map onto the Western understanding of physiology and psychology.