Abdominal acupuncture was used to treat patients with
neck pain. It was shown that abdominal acupuncture significantly improved the symptoms
compared with sham acupuncture. The study was recently published in the journal
of PLOS one.
Neck pain is a common medical condition, coming from a
number of disorders and can involve any of tissues in the neck. For example,
neck pain can come from the conditions directly affecting the muscles of the neck,
e.g. fibromyalgia. Symptoms of neck pain can range from stiff neck, sharp stabling
pain on one spot, tenderness or soreness on a general area, and pain that
radiates down into the shoulders, arms or fingers; or radiates up into the
head. Chronic neck pain is reported to severely affect people’s daily life and
downgrade the quality of life. Conventional treatments such as pain relieves
tablets is only temporary solution. The cause treatments for many cases are
more complicated.
Abdominal acupuncture is a new form of acupuncture technique,
based on traditional Chinese acupuncture meridian theory and developed by Dr.
Zhiyun Bo in 1991. Since then it has been used to effectively treat various
conditions including pain and neurological disorders.
Recently a randomized, double-blinded and sham controlled
clinical trial of effect of abdominal acupuncture on chronic pain was conducted
with 154 subjects, divided into abdominal acupuncture group (AAG, n=77) and
sham acupuncture group (SAG, n=77). The patients in AAG received acupuncture on
acupoints, CV12, CV4, bilateral KI17 and ST24 for 30 min each session, three
times a week for two weeks. The primary outcome included mean improvement in
neck pain disability scores evaluated by the Northwick Park Neck Pain Questionnaire
(NPQ). Secondary outcomes included intensity of neck pain and health-related quality-of-life
measures. The outcomes were monitored at baseline and at 2 and 6 weeks from baseline.
Patients in the AAG received additional follow-up assessment at 14 weeks from baseline.
Results showed that patients in AAG showed significantly improvement
in NPQ scores at both 2 and 6 weeks compared with those of SAG and the improvement
was maintained at 14-week follow up. The secondary outcome measures in AAG were
markedly improved compared with SAG.
The study showed that abdominal acupuncture is a very
effective alternative treatment for people with neck pain.
Reference:
Ho LF, et al., Efficacy
of abdominal acupuncture for neck pain: A randomized controlled trial. PLoS
One. 2017 Jul 17;12(7):e0181360. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0181360. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28715459
No comments:
Post a Comment