Ask any patient who's experienced kidney stones what they remember most, and they likely sum it up in one word: pain. (Ask anyone who hasn't had kidney stones what they're afraid the experience is like, and the same word generally comes to mind.) Renal colic – pain caused by a stone in the urinary tract – is often treated first with over-the-counter or prescription medication since immediate pain relief is the goal. New research suggests acupuncture is more effective.
In the double-blind, randomized, controlled trial by Zhang X, et al., published in the Journal of Pain Research, 80 adult patients (ages 18-75) with acute renal colic were divided into two groups for comparison. One group received acupuncture at two points (SP 6 – Sanyinjiao and SP 9 – Yinlingquan) for 20 minutes, plus saline injections; the second group received sham acupuncture at the same two points and 8 mg lornoxicam, a prescription nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug sold under the brand names Xefo and Xefocam, among others.
The primary outcome measure assessed was the short-term effective rate ("cured," "markedly effective" or "improved" based on 0-10 VAS scores at baseline vs. 40 minutes after treatment); secondary measures were onset time (the time it took for patients to experience the above) and the incidence of adverse reactions (nausea and dizziness). Measures were assessed at multiple time points (5,10,15, 20 and 40 minutes) following treatment.
The short-term effective rate was significantly higher in the acupuncture group (84.62 percent of patients) vs. the lornoxicam group (61 percent), and the drug group also experienced slightly more adverse reactions (three patients vs. only one in the acupuncture group).
Editor's Note: Interested in learning more? The entire study is available for review free of charge by clicking here.
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.
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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?
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