Opioid prescribing remains an all-too-common reality in the United States and elsewhere despite increasing national and international guidelines emphasizing their dangers and promoting drug-free pain-relief, including acupuncture, as a first option. But for patients taking opioids, acupuncture also can help, relieving one of the common side effects associated with their use – particularly in cases of cancer pain.
A new meta-analysis by C. Han and colleagues evaluating five randomized, controlled trials (656 total study participants) on acupuncture (with or without medication) in patients with opioid-induced constipation found acupuncture is highly effective, with an overall remission rate of 86.8 percent in the acupuncture groups compared to 78.9 percent remission in control groups. Symptom scores based on defecation frequency and straining, abdominal pain, defecation time and stool characteristics were also lower than control groups. Quality-of-life assessment scores also improved for patients receiving acupuncture to a greater extent than control-group patients.
Of the five studies, four utilized acupuncture delivered via electrical methods: interferential current stimulation (IFC), transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and electroacupuncture; the fifth utilized traditional acupuncture. Three of the five studies incorporated the acupuncture intervention alone, while two incorporated acupuncture and a co-intervention (oral lactulose in one and a gel pad containing a Chinese herb in the other).
"Acupuncture is an effective therapeutic strategy for the clinical management of opioid-induced constipation and enhances the effects of commonly prescribed drugs," concluded the study authors in their paper, published in Clinical Epidemiology this year.
Source
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
| Digital Exclusive
One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
| Digital Exclusive