Acupuncture anesthesia for complicated dental extractions in patients with lidocaine allergy.

Acupuncture anesthesia is a method of inducing an anesthetic effect through needling for a surgical operation; it was first implemented in the 1950s. It originates from Traditional Chinese Medicine and is considered one of the most important achievements in modern medicine. Acupuncture anesthesia was developed vigorously and applied widely during the 1960s and 1970s. In dentistry, most tooth extractions using acupuncture anesthesia are completed in less than 15 minutes, but difficult extractions requiring gingival incision and those taking a significantly longer time need combined acupuncture anesthesia and local anesthesia. Even though acupuncture-assisted anesthesia is the current developmental tendency in acupuncture anesthesia, we treated a single case illustrating the potential application of acupuncture anesthesia without local anesthesia for complicated dental extractions lasting for over an hour. Clinical presentation of the soft tissue abscess and periodontitis of the buccal gingiva of the upper right first molar after the metal crown was removed.