Doctors treating a South Korean woman for extreme joint pain discovered hundreds of tiny gold acupuncture needles left in her tissue.
An X-ray of the 65-year-old woman's knees and arms showed little pricks all over, which were causing her joints to ache and burn.
The woman had been diagnosed in the past with osteoarthritis, a condition that causes joint cartilage and bones to slowly break down. According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the woman decided to try alternative medicine when pain pills weren't giving her the relief she needed.
It seems the woman's acupuncturist left the needles - which, according to Yahoo News, were thought to be made of gold - in her tissue to provide further stimulation.
But Dr. Ali Guermazi, a Boston University professor of radiology who did not treat the patient, claimed leaving the needles in her body might have created more issues in the end - inflammation, infection, even abscesses.
"The needles may obscure some of the anatomy," Guermazi told Yahoo News, adding that it could also make it difficult for a medical official to assess an X-ray.
Guermazi stated that any object left in the body could lead to future complications.
"The human body wants to get rid of the foreign object," he said. "It starts with some mechanism of defense, for example inflammation and forming [fibrous tissue] around the object."
Acupuncture is a widely used form of treatment for medical conditions like arthritis. About 3.1 million U.S. adults and around 150,000 children used acupuncture to treat some type of ailment in 2007.
