British singer Toyah Willcox has credited acupuncture with ending her 40 years of insomnia.

The I Want to Be Free hitmaker began suffering disturbed sleep when she studied for exams as a teenager, and she continued to struggle after finding fame in the 1980s.

Electrical engineers in a medical research team discovered how acupuncture benefits sleep. They did it by measuring brain activity with EEG (electroencephalography) before, during and after an acupuncture treatment. Results were conclusive, acupuncture significantly increases slow wave activity of the brain relative to fast wave activity in both the frontal and central lobes. This phenomena is known to benefit the quality and duration of sleep.

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After struggling with insomnia since she was 14, Toyah Willcox is an expert at surviving on little sleep. The singer, 54, who found fame as an orange-haired punk in the Eighties, says: "I had just started revising for my GCEs and the anxiety I felt made me stop sleeping.

Acupuncture Awareness Week
25 February - 3 March 2013

Acupuncture Awareness Week, which takes place from 25 February to 3 March 2013 aims to educate people about how traditional acupuncture can help improve sleep and aid relaxation. Among the 82% of us who admit to sleeping troubles or insomnia, many of us are missing the point when it comes to this ancient Chinese medicine.

With 2.3 million acupuncture treatments carried out each year, traditional acupuncture is one of the most popular complementary therapies practised in the UK today. Yet statistics show that 1 in 5 of us would only consider acupuncture for sleep as a last resort. Almost a quarter of people admit they didn't realise acupuncture could benefit them despite its widely recognised health benefits.

A new report into the effectiveness of the complementary therapies that are commonly used for treating arthritis and other musculoskeletal conditions was recently undertaken by Arthritis Research UK.

Twenty-five therapies were considered in the report. Each therapy was scored according to their effectiveness on a scale of one (little or no evidence that it was effective) to five (good evidence that it was effective), based on published data from clinical trials. Effectiveness was measured in terms of improvements in pain, disability or quality of life. In addition the safety of each therapy was graded either green, amber or red.

Acupuncture was found to be most effective for osteoarthritis, low back pain and fibromyalgia

A new report into the effectiveness of the complementary therapies that are commonly used for treating arthritis and other musculoskeletal conditions.

The therapies that were shown to be the most effective are:

• Acupuncture for osteoarthritis, low back pain and fibromyalgia
• Massage for fibromyalgia and low back pain
• Tai chi for osteoarthritis
• Yoga for back pain

From the report:

Conclusion
Acupuncture is a treatment that involves the insertion of ultra fine, sterile needles in various locations in the body. It's one of the most studied and effective complementary therapies in the area of musculoskeletal disease, with over 70 trials, many of them high quality, made up of over 12,000 participants.

The evidence suggests that acupuncture isn't effective in rheumatoid arthritis, but there's consistent evidence that it's effective in easing some of the symptoms of osteoarthritis, low back pain and fibromyalgia. In addition, it's worth noting that, as a result of the weight of evidence accumulating on acupuncture for low back pain, the current guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) now recommend acupuncture for the treatment of persistent non-specific low back pain and most recently, migraine and tension type headaches.

Interestingly, however, NICE consider that there's not enough consistent evidence of clinical or cost effectiveness to allow a firm recommendation on the use of acupuncture for the treatment of osteoarthritis, although these guidelines, reported in 2008, are currently being updated.

The BBC lists acupuncture as one of the few evidently effective treatments for arthritis in its news item regarding the study released today by Arthritis Research UK.

"Slowly, but surely, complementary and alternative therapies are being recognised as a having health and well-being value,"

(NaturalNews) As more research is done regarding so-called "non-traditional" healthcare, doctors and scientists are rediscovering "old" treatments that are increasingly supplanting today's standard treatments for a number of conditions.

That includes coughs that often accompany the flu or mild chest infections, according to a recently published study in the journal Lancet.

About 2,000 patients from across 12 European countries were tasked with keeping an "illness journal," the BBC reports. Researchers from the University of Southampton, led by Prof. Paul Little, found that the severity and duration of symptoms in those who were treated with antibiotics were no different than those who took a placebo (experts did say; however, that if pneumonia was suspected, patients should still be treated with antibiotics because of the severity of the condition).

"Although insomnia is the most common sleep complaint, it is not a single sleep disorder. It's more accurate to think of insomnia as a symptom of another problem. The problem causing the insomnia differs from person to person," says HelpGuide.org.

What kind of stressors do you have in your life? Can you manage them better? What about your eating habits - do you like to eat heavy meals late, like within an hour of going to bed? Do you drink too much caffeine throughout the day? Each of these can cause you to lose sleep. "The good news is that most cases of insomnia can be cured with changes you can make on your own - without relying on sleep specialists or turning to prescription or over-the-counter sleeping pills," HelpGuide.org advises.

Enter acupuncture.