RESEARCH ARTICLE
Acupuncture for Pain Treatment
R. Monzani*, L. Crozzoli**, M. De Ruvo**
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 3
First Page: 60
Last Page: 65
Publisher ID: TOPAINJ-3-60
DOI: 10.2174/1876386301003010060
Article History:
Received Date: 07/09/2009Revision Received Date: 21/10/2009
Acceptance Date: 18/08/2010
Electronic publication date: 4/6/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a therapeutic system comparable to allopathic medicine. Its most known application concerns with pain control and that is why it is mostly performed by anesthesiologists, pain therapists or pure acupuncturists.
Acupuncture has great and wide potential: treatment of acute low back pain, intra-operative electro-analgesia and other therapeutic indications well recognized by WHO.
Acupuncture points can be rubbed down, warmed up, electrically stimulated or simply hit. Their existence is scientifically proven.
Acupuncture can be used in daily clinical practice: its efficacy as anti-emetic or preventive treatment for nausea and vomiting associated with pregnancy, chemotherapy and individual sensitivity is well proven.
Acupuncture can support medical therapy in the first approach to chronic pain and in the second step it can completely replace pharmacological therapy.
Although the number of treated patients is smaller, acupuncture seems to be similar to pharmacological therapy with regard to postoperative pain control.
