Everyone gets pain at some stages in their life. Pain can seriously affect the quality of life. The pain stimulus is transformed into a nerve signal sent to the brain, the pain sensation and pain response are produced by integrating and processing in the brain. Some neurotransmitters (opioid peptides, γ-aminobutyric acid, norepinephrine, and 5-hydroxytryptamine and glutamate) have been found to get involved in pain modulation.
Pain killers are effective, but at the same time, addiction, drowsiness, and other side effects could not be ignored. Abuse of painkillers may cause serious damage to brain function.
While one of the advantages of acupuncture is that it has few side effects. Acupuncture is becoming the mainstay of pain management and acupuncture has gained popularity around the world. It is commonly known that acupuncture is the effective pain management from China. Today, many types of research have confirmed that acupuncture has a positive analgesic effect in treating pain. A significant quantity of clinical trials has shown that the neuromodulation of acupuncture can control pain and inflammation in many diseases. It has an excellent curative effect in relieving headache, neuropathic pain, back pain, knee osteoarthritis etc. Some international clinical guidelines suggest that the effect of acupuncture on pain is equivalent to traditional pharmacology or interventional technology. Due to its positive effect and superior safety, it is more acceptable to the general population.In 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recognized that acupuncture alleviates pain. Modern research suggested that acupuncture the stimulates acupoints and modulates neurotransmitters producing analgesic effects.
A research paper analysed the progress and research trend of acupuncture analgesia from the data of last 10 years from 2011-2021. A total of 4781 English articles were included in the bibliometric analysis. The publication of acupuncture analgesia research more than doubled in last 10 years from 304 in 2011 to 687 in 2020. 4781 articles on acupuncture treatment for pain came from 1043 journals. Among them, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine published the largest number of publications (7.8%), followed by Medicine (4.8%) and Acupuncture in Medicine (4.8%). A total of 91 countries have published publications on acupuncture treatment for the pain of which 32 countries have published more than 20 articles. The top five countries in terms of the number of publications were China (1577 articles), the United States (1205 articles), South Korea (465 articles), England (330 articles), and Germany (258 articles).
References
Menglong Zhang, et al Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2022; 2022: 1451342.
