No abstract

Objective Auricular acupuncture (AA) and extended auricular therapy (AT) are a part of acupuncture practice shown to benefit patients with pain, anxiety, and other conditions, with cost-effective access enhanced when given in a group setting. Yet there are safety concerns and risks, perhaps unnecessary risks, that attend embedded, indwelling needles applied to the ear as a means of extended AT. Methods Electronic searches were conducted in PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) for “auriculotherapy,” “auricular acupuncture” or “auricular acupressure,” “safety,” “adverse events,” “chondritis,” and “perichondritis,” with additional manual review of titles, links, and reference lists. Individual auricular therapy adverse event (AE) case reports were included, as well as systematic reviews and or meta-analyses if they evaluated AEs associated with AT. Results Nineteen auricular AE case reports and nine safety reviews of or including auriculotherapy were included. Ten systematic reviews of AT with eight specific reviews of auricular acupressure (AP) were also included. Conclusions The primary AE risks is infection, perichondritis, and chondritis stemming from embedded or indwelling needles or potential inadvertent needlesticks from contaminated roaming sharps. Extended AP i.e., application of spheres, preferably seeds (natural, nontoxic botanical Vaccaria seeds) provides clinical benefit without the risks associated with embedded needles. More research is needed to establish if embedded needles at the ear are even necessary or have any advantage over in-session auricular acupuncture for immediate pain relief followed by ear acupressure.

The controversy surrounding the various approaches to palate repair continues unabated. Issues which have been studied relative to the development of normal speech following palate repair have included surgical technique and the timing of surgery. However, regardless of the various refinements in surgery, a percentage of children require secondary surgery to resolve velopharyngeal insufficiency. To date, other factors which might be responsible for the development of normal speech have been ignored. The purpose of this report is to discuss the importance of the relative size of the adenoids in relation to the success or failure of primary palatoplasty. Velopharyngeal valving in noncleft (normal) children was also observed. Eight hundred fifty children with nonsyndromic clefts and 138 children with syndromic clefts were analyzed for speech results postpalatoplasty relative to adenoid size. One hundred normal children were also studied. The data suggest a strongly positive correlation between the incidence of hypernasal resonance postpalatoplasty and relative adenoid size in the cleft children. Velar-adenoidal closure was consistently observed in both the cleft and normal children.

No abstract