A man gives his brother an acupuncture treatment for back pain in Taiwain in 2009.(Credit: Vivian Chen/Flickr
Posted on 05/30/2010 5:07:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I'll admit it. The seeming lack of scientific evidence that acupuncture actually relieves pain has left me skeptical since I first learned of the ancient Chinese technique. And to this day, it's possible that much of the relief patients feel during and after an acupuncture treatment results from the placebo effect.
But new research published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience finds that the natural compound adenosine, known for its anti-inflammatory properties, floods tissue that is punctured or aggravated, and may be the secret ingredient in acupuncture.
A man gives his brother an acupuncture treatment for back pain in Taiwain in 2009.(Credit: Vivian Chen/Flickr
"Acupuncture has been a mainstay of medical treatment in certain parts of the world for 4,000 years, but because it has not been understood completely, many people have remained skeptical," says Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the University of Rochester's Center for Translational Neuromedicine, where the research was conducted. "In this work, we provide information about one physical mechanism through which acupuncture reduces pain in the body."
Her team, which presents its work this week at Purines 2010 in Barcelona, inserted and rotated needles into the tender paws of mice and found that the biochemical blockade of adenosine soothed the mice about as much as giving them drugs that boost adenosine levels.
More specifically, both during and immediately following an acupuncture treatment, the level of adenosine in the tissue near the needles was 24 times greater than before the treatment. So acupuncture may relieve pain by simply tricking bodies into thinking there's been minor tissue trauma.
And yet another pin in the proverbial coffin for skeptics like myself: The researchers even found that in "adenosine receptor knock-out mice" not equipped with the adenosine receptor, acupuncture had no effect.
So what do revelations about a 4,000-year-old technique have to do with modern technology? The better we understand exactly how needles relieve pain, the more likely we are to invent modern acupuncture kits that are affordable, portable, and safe.
There's already an app, called Qpalm Acupuncture, that maps out acupoints and formulae for treating 59 diseases, and another, iLocate--Acupuncture, for finding acupuncturists near you.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. MORE HERE:
Acupuncture May Trigger Natural Painkiller
Needle insertion stimulates production of chemical known to reduce discomfort, scientists say.
The needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering a natural painkilling chemical called adenosine, a new study has found.
The researchers also believe they can enhance acupuncture’s effectiveness by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug — deoxycoformycin — that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual.
Click here to find out more!
“Acupuncture has been a mainstay of medical treatment in certain parts of the world for 4,000 years, but because it has not been understood completely, many people have remained skeptical,” lead author Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said in a news release. “In this work, we provide information about one physical mechanism through which acupuncture reduces pain in the body.”
Nedergaard and her team report their findings online May 30 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. They are also scheduled to present the results this week at the Purines 2010 scientific meeting in Barcelona.
Working exclusively with mice, Nedergaard and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group with paw discomfort.
The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain. By contrast, mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine function gained no benefit from the treatment.
The team also found that if they activated adenosine in the same tissue areas without applying acupuncture, the animals’ discomfort was similarly reduced, strongly suggesting that adenosine is the magic behind the method.
Adenosine, better known for regulating sleep, inhibits nerve signals and inflammation, the authors explained.
In their experiments with deoxycoformycin, which is known to impede adenosine removal from the body, the researchers said the drug almost tripled the amount of adenosine in the targeted muscles and more than tripled the amount of time that the mice experienced pain relief.
The study was funded by the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Program and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more information, go to
U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/
It’s a possible adjunct to, but certainly not a replacement for, sound, healthy, and knowledgeable prevention and treatment.
Yeah its been used for 5000 years so it must be fake
“It’s a possible adjunct to, but certainly not a replacement for, sound, healthy, and knowledgeable prevention and treatment.”
What is “ sound, healthy, and knowledgeable prevention and treatment”? Apparently you mean the practice of proscribing pills to mask symptoms.
I postulated something like this about thirty years ago. It made perfect sense. The presence of the needle creates inflammation, which affects neural transmission.
I know that acupuncture works. We have very close friends and the wife has a systemic disease that causes great pain. At its worse, she cannot even walk. They went to a major hospital here - and we have a few really great ones - and the doctor wanted to do acupuncture. My friend’s husband who is a complete cut-up made a lot of jokes about it but she was not only able to move her legs but walk afterward. Neither of them thought it would work and he, in particular, was skeptical and thought “no way.” There are other examples but this one is notable to me because of the severity of the problem and because they are people we know well and who are not given to “story-telling” or exaggeration.
Acupuncture has worked for me many times, especially for lower back problems and dislocated joints.
It helped the pain in my back for about a week. A steroid shot helped for 5 years.
“Yeah its been used for 5000 years so it must be fake”
Yep. I went to an Acupuncturist in Boulder, Co. and it sure helped me. I was talking to the Dr. and he said he attended school for SEVEN years to learn it. There are a lot of fakes out there however.
I came to accept that there are benefits to accupuncture, though I still don’t understand it, through a dog.
My special dog, my baby, a Chocolate Lab getting on in years, developed cancer in his left rear leg. Due to his age and the advanced nature of the cancer when it was discovered and diagnosed, surgery was out and palliative treatment was the best course ... slow down the growth of the tumor and try to delay or prevent metastasis, extend his life, make him comfortable and help his mobility.
I tried any number of things. I spent untold hours on web searches and learned things that have proved valuable since. One of those things would be the veritable medicine chest everybody has in their kitchen spice rack, filled with antimicrobials and anti-inflammatories. The other was that quality of life for dogs and people with certain cancers and neurological problems was improved with accupuncture treatment.
I had to look high and low to find a vet who was familiar or at least not hostile to more “natural,” holistic treatments. I found her, Dr. DeVore. Accupuncture was surprisingly inexpensive, $25.00 per visit. My lab settled right in with her, didn’t flinch, seemed quite happy really, so long as he didn’t see the needles. He had no clue what was being done, and I was still sort of dubious but was determined to help him. His movement improved, his pain was diminished. I watched it happen. I’m grateful.
My late father was having problems with circulation as well as loss of sensation with phantom pain due to peripheral neuropathy at the same time. He saw the change himself, and said what the heck, nothing to lose, I’ll try it too. It helped keep him walking and kept his discomfort managable until he passed away, six months after my lab.
It was a painful time for me, obviously, but I will speak highly of accupuncture for the specific purposes I mention, for pain and mobility due to cancer or due to circulation problems and peripheral neuropathy. I watched it help a dog I loved dearly. I watched it help my own father who was in declining health, and I’d have given anything to help him, still would but he’s gone. I still haven’t made peace with his passing over two years ago, don’t know that I ever really will, but life goes on, you just find a way.
I was on a homeopathy thread not long ago, bashing it. But I won’t really bash accupunture. At least there’s some action going on that’s measurable.
No, I think there are healthier ways to treat symptoms, but I trust homeopathic doctors if they are also licensed medical doctors. Common sense helps a lot also. But I’m skeptical of acupuncture.
Is that you A-Rod? How ya doin' bro?
Just kidding - it know it does have actual medicinal purposes, but it's a fairly risky treatment IMHO.
Acupuncture cured my child’s migraines. She’s too little to take migraine medication, which doesn’t really help most people anyway.
My friend used all kinds of fertility treatments and spent tons of money. The only thing that ended up working was a $50 acupuncture treatment and lots of prayers.
I always recommend avoiding away from medications. The side effects are worse than the sickness and none actually cure except antibiotics. Nothing beats healthy food and exercise.
“But I’m skeptical of acupuncture.”
Acupuncture does work if they know what they are doing. If not they can make things far worse or have no affect.
Western medicine is the best for fixing broken things but they do little to prevent or treat disease. Really good at treating symptoms though.
They get it, but they don’t get it. An analogy of the acupuncture system is how a radio deliver sounds. To do this you need the hardware of the radio, and the radio signal carrying the information that the hardware turns into sound, as well as the electricity to drive the radio hardware.
In this case, they focus entirely on the hardware of the radio, looking for a magical component that will generate sound on its own. For a long time they looked for some physical pathway, and now they are looking for a chemical. So, for example, this time they have discovered a single transistor. Is this what makes the radio generate sound?
If they were to examine acupuncture theory from the point of view of systems analysis, several important features stand out that indicate there is a lot more going on here than a simple stimulus response reaction.
To start with, the acupuncture points are organized in stable lines of function. The points on these dozen primary “meridian lines” are noticeably interactive. You poke an acupuncture needle in point number 3, for example, and you see a change in point number 10, which is physically several feet away.
The meridian lines are also validated by affecting areas of the body nowhere near the point manipulated. Such as a point on the instep that is quite effective at treating some kinds of headaches. Or a point on the back of the head quite effective at reducing hemorrhoids.
It has also been learned that each of the 12 major meridian lines is most active for a 2 hour period each day, and least active, in a healing or repair mode, for a complementary 1 hour period. Thus the 12 lines flush out a 24 hour day.
The 12 meridian lines also correspond to the activity of various internal organs, including some “imaginary” organs (guessed at because of a strong cultural taboo against autopsy.) And a logical progression of activity parallel to the daily use of the body.
0400-0600 Lungs and lung meridian. The lungs are the primary intake for “Yin” energy, which can be thought of as energy coming in, oxygen. But they also have a minor role in expelling “old” energy, which is oxygen combined with carbon as a waste product, CO2.
From 4 to 6 am, the lungs are extra active, to get rid of CO2 during the lower respiration of sleep, and to flood the cells of the body with oxygen, getting ready to wake up.
0600-0800 Large Intestine and large intestine meridian. It is a mostly “Yang” organ, whose primary job is to expel feces waste, but also has a minor “Yin” task of squeezing water out of it before it is disposed of. So the first thing you do on arising is have a bowel movement.
0800-1000 Stomach. Breakfast. Oddly enough, mostly Yang, as it is less involved with absorbing breakfast, than beating it up, sloshing it around with warm stomach acid, and breaking it up into sizes small enough to pass into the small intestine.
And so it goes through the rest of the day, generally following breakfast down the intestines, activating organs when needed in that process.
Martial artists have long been interested in that 1 hour period in which organs and their meridians are least active. This is because they figured out this is the best time to attack that subsystem, as it is most vulnerable to injury.
Acupuncturists have also figured out that the 12 meridian lines are interactive. They tend to balance each other. So if one of them is imbalanced, its opposite number will try to normalize the system by going out of balance in the opposite way. This makes it harder for a person to get sick.
One of the most dramatic “proofs” of acupuncture is the 13th meridian line. It is an independent line, sometimes called the “emergency line”. It runs right up the spine in back, and straight down the middle of the front. Importantly, it has a break in the middle, right at the top of the back of the head. This break acts like a circuit breaker in the emergency line.
Under some circumstances, the two sides of the line will close that break, and the moment they do, the person will vomit. In fact, by closing, a large amount of energy is diverted right to the stomach, to cause the spasm.
This means that the body has detected something loathsome in the stomach that the person may not be consciously aware of. So in an emergency response, it decides to eject the contents of the stomach.
And it gets the energy to do this from connecting the two halves of the emergency meridian.
This points the way to the next theory. That acupuncture points can, at times, act like electronic capacitors or inductors. Sometimes they are supposed to directly pass on energy, and if they don’t do so properly, sickness can result. Other times they are supposed to store up energy, for very specialized purposes.
So this is a very complex system, and cannot be simply resolved by a simple stimulus response, one or a few chemicals released with the insertion of a needle.
I never thought it was a hoax and it works for a lot more than pain reduction.
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