When U.S.News & World Report published a cover story on treating arthritis two weeks ago, we got lots of letters. One of the most interesting complained that we didn't tell patients about one remedy—acupuncture. That's because doctors barely mentioned it, probably because it's "alternative" medicine and out of the mainstream. That may change. Yesterday, a very mainstream medical journal, The Lancet, reported that acupuncture helped a group of people with arthritis pain in their knees.

The 294 patients in this study had osteoarthritis, the wear-and-tear form of the disease that's by far the most common. Some of them got 12 acupuncture sessions over eight weeks. Others got fake treatments: superficial needle sticks at nonacupunture points. Still others got nothing at all. All the patients were taking similar amounts of painkilling drugs at the time.

After the eight-week period, the acupuncture patients had less pain and more flexibility than either the sham treatment group or the group that received no treatment. That's welcome news, given the recent warnings and worries about painkilling drugs like naproxen and Celebrex (they may raise the risk of heart trouble), which arthritis patients often use. However, the benefit of acupuncture in this study disappeared within a year. So Andrew Moore, a pain specialist at the University of Oxford, commented in the same journal that "the need for needles is still in doubt."

OK, one course of treatment does not give long-term relief. But that's true of a lot of arthritis treatments, including ice packs, pills like Celebrex, or more hard-core interventions like injections of steroids into the knees. Arthritis hurts, often very badly. Two months of relief, using a safe treatment with no known side effects, seems worthy of some consideration. But don't go it alone. Arthritis calls for a multi-part care plan, and if you want to make acupuncture one of those parts, tell your doctor, who's managing the others and needs to know everything you're up to.