So Dr. Lixing Lao, a licensed acupuncturist and director of the traditional Chinese medicine research program at the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Medicine, suggested acupuncture to the boy and his parents.

They agreed to try it and after a series of weekly treatments, the child noted a dramatic drop in pain. "In the beginning, it was done once a week for several months," Lao remembers. "When the condition was controlled, it was less frequent." Eventually, the boy didn't need acupuncture to control the pain.

Lao is one of a growing number of acupuncturists and other health-care providers who offer the ancient Chinese therapy to children. Increasingly, pediatricians are embracing the idea — acupuncture is now an option at about one third of the 43 pediatric pain clinics nationwide, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

"It's becoming more accepted in the U.S.," says Lao, who learned the therapy as part of his medical training in China.

The American Academy of Pediatrics thus far has no official policy on acupuncture use on children.

But in 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a general consensus statement that acupuncture can help relieve certain conditions, such as nausea and vomiting that accompany chemotherapy and post-operative dental pain. The NIH statement also said acupuncture may be effective as an adjunct therapy or alternative therapy for other conditions, such as asthma, headache, low back pain, menstrual cramps and other problems.

Lao says acupuncture shows promise for a number of childhood health problems, including asthma, diarrhea, loss of appetite, eating disorders — even attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Acupuncture — inserting fine needles into the skin — relies on the premise that the body has up to 2,000 "points" that are connected by meridians (lines) of energy known as Qi ("chi"). When Qi flows well, the body stays healthy. Acupuncture restores the balance of the energy flow, or Qi.

While Lao says it's best to use acupuncture on a child no younger than 5 or 6, other experts start earlier.

Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer, director of the pediatric pain program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says she has used acupuncture on infants.

Combining acupuncture with other complementary medicine techniques works well, too, Zeltzer says. In a recent study, she and her colleagues evaluated the use of acupuncture and hypnosis together to treat chronic pain.

They evaluated 31 children, aged 6 to 18, who had a variety of health problems, such as gastric pain so severe they were doubled over or migraine headaches that a pediatric neurologist could not treat successfully.

After the needles were in place, a psychology intern performed hypnosis during the 20-minute acupuncture sessions. Then another researcher helped the child imagine a "favorite place," Zeltzer says.

"The overall improvement was pretty impressive," Zeltzer says. Both parents and the children reported significant improvements in pain after the sessions, according to the study, which appeared in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of Pain Symptom Management.

"I actually think any pain condition is amenable to acupuncture," Zeltzer says, "especially those that aren't easily fixed [by other treatments]."

The experts' advice to parents: "If their children have a common disorder and they are concerned about side effects of medication, they should consider acupuncture," Lao says. "They can also combine acupuncture with conventional medicine."

Requirements for practicing acupuncture vary state by state. To be sure an acupuncture practitioner — whether he or she is an acupuncturist or a physician — is qualified, experts suggest getting a referral from your child's pediatrician or inquiring at a pediatric pain clinic.

More information

For more information on acupuncture, see the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture. For the National Institutes of Health's consensus statement on acupuncture, click here.