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Asthma, allergic rhinitis and complementary and alternative medicine
In 2006, the 'International Board of Allergic rhinitis and Its Impact on Asthma' (ARIA) in collaboration with the 'Global Allergy and Asthma European Network' (GA2LEN) prepared an article on complementary-alternative medicine, asthma and rhinitis, presenting survey results of a large, carefully conducted literature search by Passalacqua et al. in 2005 and published in the prestigious Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 117(5).
It has long been known that many patients with asthma or allergic hay fever rely on alternative-complementary measures to treat their symptoms, but evidence of their effectiveness has been unclear.
The literature search undertaken by the authors found that
- Some positive results are achieved when allergic rhinitis symptoms are treated by homeopathic means, although the authors noted that some trials also recorded no improvements.
- The use of acupuncture for rhinitis and asthma remains inconclusive.
- Herbal remedies showed some efficacy when applied to rhinitis and asthma, but the number of studies was too small to provide conclusive results. There also remained the issue of safety.
The authors concluded that currently available evidence does not indicate that alternative or complementary therapies are particularly effective in treating rhinitis or asthma.
Another major review by Xue et al. (2006) in the Journal Current Opinion in Allergy & Clinical Immunology suggests that acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine treatments might be effective for allergic rhinitis, although the authors caution that evidence is still tentative and needs larger, multi-centre trials in the future.
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