A study of acupuncture in adult sensorineural hearing loss.

Twenty-nine adult volunteers with stable bilateral sensorineural hearing loss were treated by acupuncture. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups: active needling, active needling followed by sham needling, sham needling followed by active needling, and sham needling. All subjects received 30 treatments. Only one ear was treated by acupuncture. The second ear was kept for an intrasubject control. Prior to treatment a baseline of hearing was established. During the course of acupuncture, audiological assessments (pure tone thresholds and speech tests) were made after sets of five treatments. Hearing was again measured during the year following acupuncture. The results in individual subjects and statistical comparisons of active and sham groups showed that acupuncture did not produce significant shifts in hearing.