Tag: acupuncture research

Health & Fitness

Acupuncture and Insomnia

A very nice review of the hazards of insomnia and the research behind acupuncture’s effectiveness to treat it.Insomnia and Acupuncture ” the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, five kinds of spirits inhabit the five zang-organs (heart, liver, lung, spleen and kidney). Each kind of spirit has a corresponding physiological function. The five zang-organs are unable…

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Medical Research

Brain Physiology Behind Electroacupuncture’s Modulating Effect on Blood Pressure

Nice.  This article appears in Nature, quite a coup. There is a lot about this paper that surprises me.  Perhaps I’m just not familiar enough with this type of experimental set up, and haven’t been aware of these studies.   What they found was that naloxone interfered with the suppression of blood pressure by electroacupuncture…

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Case Studies

Clinical Case Study: Complexity and Parasympathetic

I’ve been focusing on getting my presentation ready for the Anaheim AAMA conference coming up.  But, as usual, when diving into any new research in my field, I’ve encountered some new perspectives that have been thought provoking. I’ve been in correspondence with Xavier Bornas who has done interesting work on Flight Phobia and HRV-no acupuncture-…

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Case Studies

Stress Reduction Stories Good and Bad by the Data

  Though we don’t know the end of this tale yet, it illustrates what the stress monitoring data may be telling us. The questions I’m actively investigating are How does the patient’s nervous system  respond to the subtle stressor of needling? How does the patient’s stress level respond after needling on the table? What happens…

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Medical Research

Allergic Rhinitis and HRV

This reference is from 2009 and it has really changed the way I’m looking at all of this.  What they maintain in their article is that patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis and atopy in general have too much parasympathetic input, ie too much “rest and digest.”  How I missed this whole body of research is…

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Case Studies

Autonomic Function, HRV, in Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis

 This article looks at autonomic balance before and after a series of 12 acupuncture sessions.  (Update: full article text here.)What they say is that the patients with Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis have a higher resting heart rate to start, and blunted cardiovascular response to cold pressor test.  This is fascinating to me since one of the…

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Medical Research

Electroacupuncture and PCOS effects

  This is a complicated/detailed study of the effects of electroacupuncture and manual acupuncture on a PCOS rat model.  The details are way over my head, but it seems that the acupuncture effects are not necessarily achieved through the sympathetic nervous system.  Of great interest to me since the autonomic nervous system is my area…

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Case Studies

Acupuncture for Acne: Clinical Case Study with HRV

  This turned out to be a pretty good illustration of some of the issues I’m exploring with stress monitoring (HRV) as a function of acupuncture treatment. This is a patient late 30’s who has had some upheaval in her personal life, but healthy and fit by most metrics.  Her most pressing problem at the…

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Case Studies

Acupuncture and Fertility: Case Studies with Stress Response(HRV)

The point of my research is to try to capture the healing “shift” that can occur with acupuncture.  Heart rate variability (HRV) could be uniquely well suited to this since it reflects very subtle physiological changes. Since I don’t really know what I’m looking for exactly, I try to look in depth at the HRV data…

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Medical Research

Neurobiological Mechanisms of Acupuncture

A series of articles about the science and neurobiology of acupuncture treatment.  The summary is here. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2014; 2014: 765068. Published online Nov 27, 2014. doi:  10.1155/2014/765068 PMCID: PMC4265683 Neurobiological Mechanisms of Acupuncture 2014 Lijun Bai, 1 , * Richard E. Harris, 2 Jian Kong, 3 Lixing Lao, 4 , 5 Vitaly Napadow, 6 and Baixiao Zhao 7 Author information ► Article notes ► Copyright and License information ► Acupuncture is currently gaining…

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