Acupuncture effective for Bell's Palsy - Peripheral Facial Paralysis

Peripheral facial paralysis, or Bell's Palsy, is a commonly seen condition by many doctors of both eastern and western persuasions.  The western medical standard of care is often a wait and see approach.  This is very undesirable from a patients perspective for obvious reasons. 

Acupuncture has long been used to treat facial paralysis (and other forms of paralysis, stroke, etc.) and with reasonable good success.  There have been a number of studies on bell's palsy with acupuncture to try to find the most reliable ways to treat it.  Even from the Chinese Medicine side it can be recalcitrant in certain people, so finding more treatment options is always desireable.

In this study researchers from the Department of acupuncture and moxibustion in the Shenzhen Bao'an hospital (part of Southern Medical University) compared two groups of facial paralysis patients both receiving standard western medicine care and one receiving acupuncture in addition.  The study had 120 facial paralysis patients split evenly between a treatment group and a control group.  The points used were as follows:

On the effected side - TH 17, GB 12, ST 4, ST 6, GB 14, Taiyang, Qianzheng, UB 2
On the healthy side - LI 4

After treatment the study found that the acupuncture group responded better and within less time.  The actual results were a 88.3% cure rate in the observation group compared to 66.7% in the control group (again both had medication as well).