I have found the study I referred to a few days ago which appeared at the ASCO conference this year.

It was a cross over study. This is a nice design for this sort of thing that puts half the patients on one of the treatments for an allotted time, and then have a "do nothing" period called washout, before "crossing over" to the other treatment. The other half of the group do the same thing but reverse the treatments. This helps off set the possibility that something other than the treatment under investigation was responsible for any effect (such as the patient was going to get better anyway).

Anyway, onto the study:

145 patients (big) were randomised to one group or the other. the patients were all head and neck survivors with xerostomia (dry mouth)of more than 18 months out from treatment. They compared standardised oral care education with 8 weekly treatments of acupuncture. The study found that both education and acupuncture improved patient reported symptoms but acupuncture helped more people. 24% in one group experienced improvement with acupuncture with 19% for education, whilst in the other group 26% improved after acupuncture and 14% after education.

The symptoms that acupunture improved significantly more than education were: sticky saliva, need to sip to swallow food, and waking up at night needing to drink. The downside to these results is that they were scored according to patient ratings which is a bit subjective. Howevever, in my view it doesn't matter if nothing actually happened - the important thing is that the patient believes they are in a better place as a result.

There was no significant difference between the treatments in terms of saliva production unfortunately.

The investigators concluded
[quote]No adverse events were seen. Eight sessions of weekly group acupuncture provides significantly better relief of radiation induced xerostomia than group oral care education.[/quote]

If anyone wants to read the whole thing themselves the paper was presented at ASCO 2012 by Simock R et al and was titled ARIX: A randomized trial of acupuncture versus oral care sessions in patients with chronic radiation-induced xerostomia following treatment for head and neck cancer and appeared in J Clin Oncol 30, 2012 (suppl; abstr 5527)