Surprising Source of Woman’s Knee Pain

Talk about a gold mine.

Doctors expecting to treat a South Korean woman for osteoarthritis found a treasure trove of presumed gold in the tissue surrounding her knees. The source of the metal?Tiny acupuncture needles purposely left in her tissue for pain relief.

The 65-year-old woman first attempted to treat her osteoarthritis (a condition in which the cartilage and bones within the joints degrade) with pain relievers and anti-inflammatory drugs but the remedy failed and led to stomach discomfort, according to a recap of the unusual case in The New England Journal of Medicine. With few options left and the pain in her knees continuing, the woman tried acupuncture, an alternative medical practice that uses needles to stimulate certain points on the body to alleviate pain or treat disease.

The acupuncture needles were intentionally left in the woman’s tissue for continued stimulation and, obviously, pain relief. The tiny needles, however, only triggered more pain — as do most foreign objects left inside the body.

“The human body wants to get rid of the foreign object,” Ali Guermazi, a radiology professor at Boston University, told LiveScience. “It starts with some mechanism of defense, for example inflammation and forming [fibrous tissue] around the object.”

Other problems can arise as well. X-rays, for example, can be difficult to read with foreign objects in the way. “The needles may obscure some of the anatomy,” said Guermazi, who was not involved in the case. “The patient can’t go into an MRI because needles left in the body may move, and damage an artery.”

There is little scientific evidence to support the efficacy of acupuncture treatment. Nevertheless, the practice is widely used as a treatment for painful joints, and the insertion of pieces of sterile gold threads around the joint is a common treatment for arthritis in Asian countries, according to experts.

In the United States, an estimated 3.1 million adults and 150,000 children were treated with acupuncture in 2007, according to a survey by the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.