Smoking is a serious health concern. Many people who smoke will suffer negative health consequences for their entire lives. As a result, it is important for smokers to find a smoking cessation method that works for them in order to improve and maintain their health. Acupuncture has been used as a method to help with nicotine withdrawal symptoms in order to aid patients in smoking cessation. “Body Acupuncture for Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms: A Randomized Placebo-controlled Trial” by Min-Kyung Hyun et al, discusses an experiment that was conducted in order to find whether acupuncture aided in a depression of nicotine withdrawal symptoms.
The study was designed to offer either real acupuncture treatment to patients or sham acupuncture. In other words, one group of participants received real acupuncture treatments while the second group received fake acupuncture treatments. The independent variable is the real acupuncture treatments and the fake acupuncture treatments are the controlled variable (Hyun, et al, 1094). These treatments were controlled by the researchers and therefore the relationship between the depression of nicotine withdrawal symptoms and acupuncture treatment could be explored.
In addition, this independent variable is such because it was controlled by the experimenters and could have been changed in necessary. The dependent variable is the depression of nicotine withdrawal symptoms (Hyun, et al, 1094). This the phenomena that was being researched and observed throughout the study. The goal of the study was to find out whether there were changes in the dependent variable by observing the two different independent variables.
The two different groups are necessary because the researchers will be able to gain an accurate picture of whether or not acupuncture works in depressing nicotine withdrawal symptoms by comparing the group getting real acupuncture treatment with the group receiving fake acupuncture treatment. The participants included in this study were volunteers who wanted to quit smoking. They were recruited through local mass media advertising to participate in the study. The program they volunteer for included a four-week quit smoking program conducted at Dunsan Oriental Hospital in Daejeon, South Korea (Hyun, et al, 1094).
The volunteers had to agree to certain conditions in order to participate as well as meet very specific criteria in order to be eligible. Participants were required to be between the ages of 18 and 65 and needed to have been smoking ten cigarettes or more for at least six months. They also agreed to quit smoking by the agreed upon stop smoking date. In addition, they were required to have tried to stop smoking at least once without success. They were not eligible to participate if they had tried acupuncture in the past. Participants could not have diagnosed with a psychiatric illness including problems with drugs and/or alcohol.
Eligible participants could not be taking any types of medication for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension or diabetes. Finally, participants could not be pregnant or actively trying to conceive (Hyun, et al, 1094). The Institutional Review Board approved the study so researchers were able to proceed with screening and selecting participants from the pool of people who volunteered. Between August 2006 and December 2006, eighty-seven people were screened who fit the criteria to be participants. Of those eighty-seven, eighty signed the consent form.
The participants were randomly assigned to receive either real acupuncture treatments or fake acupuncture treatments. There were thirty-eight participants receiving real treatments and forty-two participants receiving fake treatments. The participants were told that they would receive one of the two types of treatments and that both had the potential to help them quit smoking. The participants were not informed as to which type of treatment they received. In addition, clinical observers were blinded as to which treatment each participant received.
Finally, the doctors administering the acupuncture were instructed not to talk with the patients while they performed the procedure (Hyun, et al, 1094). The results of the study show that there positive benefits from both the real and the fake acupuncture treatments. However, these positive benefits were only for the short term. In the long term, real acupuncture was no better at treating nicotine withdrawal symptoms than the fake acupuncture was (Hyun, et al, 1096). In addition, this was the first study of this kind using a fake acupuncture control group.
This speaks to the reliability of the study. The results show interesting data but the fact that it was the first study using fake acupuncture as a control group proves that the study must be repeated several times in order to see if the same results would be consistent among other populations as well. However, the data proves to be reliable for this particular group of participants. The study only included eighty participants. This isn’t a large enough sample size to be representative of the entire population.
Including a significantly larger pool of participants would provide more reliable data that would represent a larger population. In addition, there was no information given about specific age and race of the participants. This would have provided a different outcome as well because of the different health issues that face different age and racial groups. The researchers did a good job of screening their participants in order to meet certain criteria but they could have received more reliable results by including many more people of different ages and racial backgrounds.
Another way this study isn’t proven to be highly reliable is in the area of the length of follow up and the number to sessions offered. Typically, patients need to be observed six months later in order to see if they have been successful at stopping smoking. However, this study did its follow up only two weeks after the last treatment (Hyun, et al, 1094). In addition, the participants were only given six acupuncture treatments over the course of two weeks. This doesn’t seem to be an adequate amount of time given that it usually takes much longer to successfully stop smoking.
Finally, even though participants had not received acupuncture for smoking cessation, all participants had received acupuncture for other reasons in the past. As a result, it is very difficult to provide fake acupuncture since participants were aware of what real acupuncture felt like. This proves the results to be unreliable since participants had the potential for discovering which treatment group they were a part of. The areas of the study that allows it to be reliable for such a small participant group are the screening procedures used.
The double blind method is highly effective in producing results that are not affected by outside sources. Since neither the patients nor the observers knew which type of acupuncture treatment was being used, more reliable results were gathered since neither group could control the eventual outcome. Double blind experiments are more reliable than other types simply because there is no chance that the researchers or participants can skew the results one way or the other. Despite the areas that needed to be improved to show better reliability, this study is valid.
It makes an effort to find a treatment that could help people stop smoking by depressing nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Since it’s the first study to use fake acupuncture treatments as the controlled variable, it is a good starting point for further research. More studies of the same kind could prove that acupuncture has the potential to help with nicotine withdrawal symptoms in people who wish to stop smoking. Hyun, Min-Kyung; Soo Lee, Myeong; Kang, Kyungwon; &Choi, Sun-Mi. (2007). “Body Acupuncture for Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms: A Randomized Placebo-controlled Trial. ” Oxford Journals, 10: 1093 – 1098.