The clinical efficacy and safety of acupuncture in the treatment of Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis (SAR) was evaluated by employing a two-phase crossover single-blind clinical trial. Thirty subjects were randomly assigned to two groups with 17 and 13 subjects respectively and treated with real or sham acupuncture (three times per week) for four consecutive weeks and then a crossover for treatments ...

BACKGROUND Treatment of patients according to individual pattern diagnoses is an important feature of acupuncture rooted in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Little is known about the reliability of TCM pattern diagnoses. OBJECTIVE To examine in a cross-sectional study the inter-rater reliability of TCM diagnoses and acupuncture point selection. METHODS 30 infertile and 24 previously preg...

OBJECTIVES To determine if there is any difference in pupillary response among different acupuncture stimulation sites. METHODS The subjects were 14 healthy males who had no known eye diseases or abnormality in their pupils. They received five different interventions: no acupuncture stimulation (hereinafter 'no-stimulation') and acupuncture stimulation at four sites (TE5, ST7, CV12 and ST36)....

BACKGROUND We report on the design and implementation of a study protocol entitled Acupuncture randomised trial for post anaesthetic recovery and postoperative pain - a pilot study (ACUARP) designed to investigate the effectiveness of acupuncture therapy performed in the perioperative period on post anaesthetic recovery and postoperative pain. METHODS/DESIGN The study is designed as a randomi...

A large amount of evidence suggests that acupuncture stimulation enhances the experimental pain threshold in various animal models. Acupuncture analgesia is mediated by the endogenous opioid system, and the analgesic response to acupuncture shows individual variation. This study identified and characterized the genes that differ between high responders (HR) and low responders (LR) on acupunctur...

Saam acupuncture is one of the original therapeutic modalities representing traditional Korean medicine. It was originally described in a manuscript that is estimated to be published at some point between 1644 and 1742, in the middle of the Cho Sun dynasty, by a Korean Buddhist monk whose name is unknown. The principle of combining five shu points is based on the theory of Nan-jing. The treatme...

The efficacy of acupuncture as an adjunctive therapy to pharmacological treatment of chronic pain due to knee osteoarthritis was studied with a 3-armed, single-blind, randomized, sham-controlled trial; it compared acupuncture combined with pharmacological treatment, sham acupuncture including pharmacological treatment, and pharmacological treatment alone. A total of 120 patients with knee osteo...

This study was performed to observe the influence of sham and different verum acupuncture manipulations on skin temperature of the stimulated acupoint in healthy volunteers. Thirty-seven healthy volunteers with a mean age of 25.4 ± 2.2 years were enrolled in the study. All volunteers had experienced acupuncture before. They received sham acupuncture and two different kinds of verum acupuncture ...

The therapeutic effects of acupuncture in decreasing blood pressure are ambiguous and underlying acupuncture in hypertension treatment has not been investigated. Our objective was to observe the change of quality of life and compare the differences in brain functional connectivity by investigating instantaneous and short-term acupuncture treatment in essential hypertension patients. A total of ...

PURPOSE To discuss which brain region potentially functioned and switched between the immediate and delayed response of acupuncture. MATERIALS AND METHODS A nonrepeated event-related functional MRI (fMRI) design was used to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of acupuncture effects induced by needling an acupoint ST36 (ACU) and a nonmeridian point (SHAM). The standard general linear...