Acupuncture gives knees a lift.

For thousands of years, Chinese doctors have prescribed acupuncture for what they call "bi syndrome" -- arthritis, a disease U.S. physicians normally treat with pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs.

Now, some U.S. doctors are trying the Chinese approach for patients who fail to respond to standard therapy, and they are meeting with partial success, report Madalene K. Greene and her colleagues at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

In the study, 12 patients age 55 and older who had moderate to severe osteoarthritis in their knees received acupuncture twice a week for 8 weeks. Greene reported the team's findings April 30 in Baltimore at the Clinical Research Meeting, sponsored by the Association of American Physicians, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the American Federation for Clinical Research.

After 4 weeks, 4 of the 12 volunteers reported on questionnaires that they felt moderate or marked relief from pain and improvement in mobility; by the end of treatment, 6 of the 10 subjects who remained in the study claimed to feel better. At the end of a 16-week follow-up period, six of the eight remaining volunteers reported feeling better than they did when therapy began.

The patients didn't perform as well as they felt, however. After 8 weeks, they walked a 50-foot stretch of hallway faster than when the study started, but that improvement disappeared by the end of the follow-up, says Marc C. Hochberg.

Greene examined the volunteers without knowing the outcome of the other tests or self-reports. She got still different results. At 8 weeks, 7 of the 10 patients had improved; but by the study's end, that number had dropped to two of eight.

The researchers plan to compare in a larger group the efficacy of acupuncture to that of traditional drug treatment.