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PCOS and losing hair can acupuncture help?

 

This is a difficult question to answer. There is some evidence that acupuncture can help with PCOS, and a study of 24 patients in Goteberg is often cited as a positive indicator that acupuncture may well become a more widely used treatment. Certainly the author of this study
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039006/
 
seems confident that acupuncture in particular and alternative/complementary medicine in general may well be what a great many women with the condition now turn to as a treatment strategy.
 
However, the evidence of success in treating one symptom of PCOS such as hair loss simply doesn't exist, and it might be the case that acupuncture could effect useful changes in many aspects of the condition but have no effect on the hair. If this is what the main focus of concern is, then we couldn't say with any confidence that research supports a positive recommendation.
 
However, working within an entirely different paradigm of medicine, which means that the symptoms a patient describes and the signs he or she sees are interpreted in an entirely different way. For a Chinese medicine practitioner the signs and symptoms associated with PCOS in the West may be interpreted in a number of different ways in Chinese medicine, and the treatment geared to the individual balances of the patient. In that context, there may be ways in which the hair thinning and loss may make sense, and be amenable to treatment. Anecdotally we hear of people having great successes, but the reports are self-selecting; happy people want to tell everyone, people for whom it hasn't worked tend simply to move on to another modality.
 
It would be well worth visiting a BAcC member local to you for advice, though, to see what they would recommend having had a chance to talk to you face to face about the problems you are experiencing. We trust that they will give you honest and impartial advice about your best options.  

 

World Health Organisation


The World Health Organisation lists a wide variety of diseases or disorders for which acupuncture therapy has been tested in controlled clinical trials

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