Get articles, daily on the email! Exactly how you set up an acupuncture clinic after the course depends a good deal on your individual circumstances. GPs, hospital consultants, physiotherapists in hospital or private practice – all will have to find their own particular approach. Some general advice does however apply to practically all groups. There is no need to start needling [...]
A fair amount of research in acupuncture has appeared, much of it of rather dubious quality. There are certain intrinsic difficulties confronting anyone who wants to do clinical research of this kind, much of it centred on the choice of a suitable control procedure. To the mildly interested onlooker with no particular interest in acupuncture [...]
Ear acupuncture is the best known of the so-called microsystems of acupuncture, which hold that there is a representation of the body in a small area. The story of ear acupuncture begins with a French doctor, Paul Nogier, of Lyon (see Kenyon 1983a). In the early 1950s Nogier was intrigued to find that some of [...]
TENS can be used to relax spastic limbs in multiple sclerosis. The electrodes are placed over the femoral or sciatic nerves. For some unexplained reason it does not seem to work in spasticity from other causes. Prof. Kaada, a Finnish neurologist, has described the use of TENS to increase the peripheral circulation to treat ulcers [...]
Although transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is not strictly speaking acupuncture, there is a good deal of overlapping with acupuncture and probably some common ground in the ways they work. TENS is primarily used for the relief of pain although it can be used in other circumstances also. TENS machines put out pulsed current at [...]
Some acupuncturists have become enthusiastic about using low-power lasers to stimulate acupuncture points. The origins of this idea are unclear but the appeal is evident, since the treatment is pain-free therefore suitable for children or people who are afraid of acupuncture and also because there is no risk of infection. However the relevance of this [...]
A number of machines have come on the market which purport to detect acupuncture points electrically. Most depend on the theory that acupuncture points are areas of reduced skin resistance, and they usually have a neutral electrode plus a searching electrode ending in a blunt point. The weakness of nearly all these machines is that [...]