text_1: Electro-acupuncture for disrupted sleep in women with breast cancer
text_2: This short release reports on a small study looking at whether electro-acupuncture is effective in diminishing night-time hot flashes among breast cancer survivors, and therefore, improving the quality of their sleep. While it states that this therapeutic approach is as good as, or perhaps better, than a drug (gabapentin) often prescribed for hot flashes, the release offers no data showing the extent of improvement, nor are there mentions of the cost of such treatments, or of potential harms from using it which, while not enormous, are not negligible either. The release also neglects to identify any of the researchers involved in the trial. More and more people are surviving breast cancer and there is increasing interest among survivors and clinicians about quality of life for survivors. As the release states, perhaps 6 million patients may have survived by the year 2020, meaning even serious discomforts like hot flashes among such patients will become a growing problem. The release hints that this approach may be effective for such people, but it fails to provide aspects critical to really evaluating this “news.”