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Complementary and alternative therapies for osteoarthritis include physical therapies such as:

• Acupuncture, which appears to improve function and provide pain relief for people with osteoarthritis.²⁴
• Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, to stimulate cartilage growth. Small positive results have been shown, but further research is needed.²⁵
• Mind/body control, such as yoga, tai chi, and qi gong.
• Magnetic bracelets. A small study suggests that hip and knee pain from arthritis may decrease when a person wears a magnetic bracelet, although why this may happen is not clear.²⁶ Most evidence shows the effect is no greater than with a placebo.

These therapies may be helpful for some people, although their effectiveness has not been proven. Most of the studies on complementary and alternative therapies for osteoarthritis have been done on glucosamine and acupuncture and involve osteoarthritis of the knee. Most of these studies show that either of these therapies is better than treatment with a placebo.

What To Think About

Talk to your doctor about other treatments for osteoarthritis. There are many medicines, exercises, braces, assistive devices, and other treatments, and different combinations of treatments work for different people.

Research continues on developing medicines and other ways to change the structure of cartilage. Researchers hope these methods will reduce cartilage destruction and stimulate repair of existing damage. Tetracyclines are some of the medicines that researchers are currently studying. Other agents being studied include protease and collagenase inhibitors, growth factors, and cytokine inhibitors. Researchers are also investigating cartilage transplants and use of stem cells to grow new cartilage.^{1, 3}

Note that most research studies for osteoarthritis have been of knee osteoarthritis. So it is hard to know if treatments that work for the knee might also work for other joints such as the hands, hip, or spine joints.