Acupuncture: What Underlies Needle Administration?

Abstract

Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese therapy with its mode of action unclear and efficacy inconclusive. A lack of attention given to the role of psychosocial context presented in clinical provision of acupuncture may mainly account for the current dilemma in acupuncture research. This psychosocial context induces various cognitive and affective processes in the patient while receiving this treatment. On the basis of the analysis of these psychological factors involved in clinical provision of acupuncture and in light of prior studies on the placebo effect, the author hypothesizes that acupuncture works through potentiation and modulation of a highly organized and somatotopic network of endogenous opioids that links expectation, attention and body schema. This hypothesis, which focuses on the contextual factors involved in clinical provision of acupuncture, has immediate clinical and experimental implications and will take the acupuncture debate much further forward.

An fMRI study on the interaction and dissociation between expectation of pain relief and acupuncture treatment

“…Thus, the lack of analgesia effect in the VL group by no means implies that acupuncture does not work, but rather indicates the importance of expectation in the treatment process. In fact, we believe this finding is consistent with the essence of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Liu, 2008). For instance, the oldest canonical classic of Chinese medicine, the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic ( Huang Di Nei Jing ) written in the first century BCE, states that, “if a patient does not consent to therapy [acupuncture] with positive engagement, the physician should not proceed as the therapy will not succeed” ( SuWen Chapter 11).…”

Psychophysical and neurophysiological responses to acupuncture stimulation to incorporated rubber hand

“…Acupuncture may be defined as the insertion of one or more needles into specific sites on the body surface for the purpose of treatment [19]. Neuroimaging studies investigating the acupuncture process have observed overlapping brain activations in the cortical sensorimotor and salient networks, as well as deactivations in the limbic-paralimbic neocortical network [7,13].…”

Modifying Bodily Self-Awareness during Acupuncture Needle Stimulation Using the Rubber Hand Illusion

“…The clinical effects of acupuncture treatment (e.g., analgesic effects) have been investigated and confirmed in a number of studies in animals and in clinical populations, and many researchers have contributed to identifying the brain processes activated by acupuncture [23]. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms of acupuncture and its mode of action are unclear, and psychosocial and contextual factors such as expectation, attention, and body schema may play important roles in the clinical effects of acupuncture [24]. However, no studies are available in which different aspects of bodily self-awareness have been actively manipulated and investigated.…”