BACKGROUND Whether acupuncture treatment employing multiple penetrating, skin-touch placebo, or no-touch placebo needles designed for double blinding actually do blind practitioners and patients has not been investigated. We aimed to investigate this question. SUBJECTS 120 patients with functional neck/shoulder stiffness but in otherwise healthy condition were randomly assigned to a treatment...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the pattern of experimental pain responses at acupoints in patients with unilateral shoulder pain. DESIGN A cross-sectional matched study. SETTING Acupuncture and Moxibustion Department, Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine Affiliated to Capital Medical University. PARTICIPANTS Volunteer samples of 60 participants (30 patients with unilateral shoulder ...

This study compared the interrater agreement for pattern differentiation and acupoints prescription between two groups of human patients simulated with different diagnostic outcomes. Patients were simulated using a dataset about zangfu patterns and separated into groups (n = 30 each) according to the diagnostic outcome determined by a computational model. A questionnaire with 90 patients was de...

Introduction This is the second of a series of articles that highlight human anatomy issues of relevance to acupuncture practitioners. Whilst the framework of the articles is built around anatomical structures that should be avoided when needling, the aim is not to frighten practitioners, but rather to instil confidence in safe needling techniques. Most textbooks of acupuncture use relative sca...

INTRODUCTION Point injection as a therapeutic technique is well documented, but its physiological effects have not been formally compared with traditional acupuncture. One aim of this study was to compare the effects of the two techniques at one acupuncture point, as a step towards understanding the mode of action of point injection and validating its clinical use. A second aim was to explore w...

We used synchrotron x-ray fluorescence analysis to probe the distribution of four chemical elements in and around acupuncture points, two located in the forearm and two in the lower leg. Three of the four acupuncture points showed significantly elevated concentrations of elements Ca, Fe, Cu and Zn in relation to levels in the surrounding tissue, with similar elevation ratios for Cu and Fe. The ...

Every acupoint has specific indications for acupuncture treatment. These indications, primarily established based on the meridian system, have spatial patterns of symptoms on the human body. We investigated the associations between acupoints and symptom locations in 75 patients with chronic pain who were asked to sketch the localization of their symptoms on body schemes using the bodily sensati...

Stimulation at specific acupoints can activate cortical regions in human subjects. Previous studies have mainly focused on a single brain region. However, the brain is a network and many brain regions participate in the same task. The study of a single brain region alone cannot clearly explain any brain-related issues. Therefore, for the present study, magnetic stimulation was used to stimulate...

15 The efficacy of acupuncture in smoking cessation, and its effect on the urge to smoke are unclear. We evaluated the effect of a standardized protocol of transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulations (TEAS) on alleviating the urge to smoke. Ninety-eight smokers were recruited in two double-blind studies. Participants abstained from smoking for 26 h, and were randomized to receive TEAS alterna...