Acupuncture for Hot Flashes in Breast Cancer Patients

Consider a safe, painless remedy for premature menopause symptoms like hot flashes that occur during breast cancer treatment. Here's what you should know.

Should you consider acupuncture?

Acupuncture is an option to try for hot flashes you may experience if you have breast cancer, especially when you can’t take hormone-based medicine, which can feed cancer.

Your doctors may talk with you about gabapentin (Neurontin), a well-established seizure and nerve medication that can help hot flashes, and the anti-depressant paroxetine (Paxil) in low-doses. In that conversation, you might ask about acupuncture as well.

During an acupuncture session, your practitioner will insert thin, solid metallic needles at certain points in your body, sometimes enhanced by electricity to provide more stimulation. The Chinese treatment, which goes back centuries, was banned in China and Japan until Chairman Mao revived it in the 1950s and 1960s when medical care was lacking.  

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Exactly how the practice produces health benefits remains unclear. Many people find it relaxing, and it seems to have a stronger-than-usual placebo effect. That’s a good thing if you feel better. Just make sure you’ve evaluated your options and see someone whom you can trust to use good hygiene.

Acupuncture for hot flashes

After chemotherapy or surgery, breast cancer survivors can experience premature menopause, including severe and frequent hot flashes. The estrogen-blocking medications many women take can cause hot flashes as well. But standard hormone replacement therapy for menopause is often off-limits.

In at least one study, acupuncture beat gabapentin, a commonly used alternative, proving to be a powerful placebo.

In general, acupuncture hasn’t been thoroughly researched. In an overview of clinical trials of acupuncture for cancer-related symptoms, researchers found 13 randomized controlled studies assessing the treatment’s effect on hot flashes, which were positive. The researchers noted, however, that the studies were not high-quality.

Another review discovered evidence that acupuncture beat a standard treatment for the severity of hot flashes, but not frequency. But patients did get relief.  

Both real and fake acupuncture beat alternatives in a small early study. In the study, researchers randomly assigned 120 breast cancer survivors, all suffering from many hot flashes daily, into four different groups.

One group received electroacupuncture (acupuncture with embedded needles that deliver weak electrical currents) twice a week while another group received sham acupuncture, involving no real penetration with needles or actual electric current, two times weekly.

The third group received daily doses of gabapentin. The fourth took a placebo pill containing no active ingredients.

After eight weeks, the electroacupuncture group had the greatest improvement, reporting fewer and less severe hot flashes. The treatment reduced symptoms by 25 percent more than fake acupuncture, which did better than both gabapentin or the placebo pills, which had the least effect.

The study suggests that electroacupuncture goes beyond making patients hopeful — but it wasn’t larger or conclusive. That said, it shows the power of placebos.

“The results of this trial show that even sham acupuncture — which is effectively a placebo — is more effective than medications,” noted lead author Jun J. Mao, MD, a specialist in acupuncture at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “The placebo effect is often dismissed as noise, but these results suggest we should be taking a closer look at how we can best harness it.”

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