Tag: pain and the brain
Acupuncture modulates the abnormal brainstem activity in migraine without aura patients.
A sizable portion of my practice is devoted to migraine patients, finding best treatments and researching their physiological response. This paper looks at the role of abnormal brainstem activity in migraine patients without aura and how acupuncture affects it. As with most Chinese studies we can only partly draw conclusions since they treated 5 x…
Read MoreElectroacupuncture Helps Alcohol Withdrawal in Mice
This article contains a few things I did not know. The most basic one is that EtOh withdrawal leads to hypersensitivity to pain. This suggests all sorts of different strategies to alleviate alcohol withdrawal symptoms. In this study, they induced alcohol dependence and compared pain tolerance in Etoh withdrawal mice to Etoh naive mice and…
Read MoreAcupuncture Stimulation and EEG fMRI
Carefully done study in healthy volunteers looking at stimulation of St36 compared to nonacupuncture points. Mu wavelength increases with acupuncture stim, not with stim to nonacupuncture points. This suggests that there is a pain inhibitory effect through the mu activity that is triggered by acupuncture at acupuncture points, but not at nearby points. Full…
Read MoreBrain sensitization to external and internal stimuli.
This concept may be important in chronic pain and fibromyalgia. I am starting to wonder if it explains the phenomenon that I sometimes see in the clinic, that patients need less and less stimulation for clinical response. Indeed, sometimes more needling leads to lower HRV and poorer response. A topic for further study for…
Read MoreLow Frequency Transcutaneous Electrostimulation More Effective on Opiate Receptors in Animal Studies
Low frequency acupuncture better than high frequency for pain in animal study. Interesting since there has been a lot of research on the different opiate receptors involved in 2Hz versys 100 hz. Maybe bogus? Maybe not? J Neurosci Res. 2014 Jan 31. doi: 10.1002/jnr.23351. [Epub ahead of print] Low- and high-frequency transcutaneous electrical acupoint…
Read MoreChronic Low Back Pain Characterized by Emotional Circuits in the Brain
This post is for background purposes. There has been interesting work done in the Acupuncture Research community looking at which regions of the brain light up during acupuncture. I don’t claim to be an expert in any way on this topic, but I think it might be key to understanding acupuncture’s mechanisms and, perhaps, ways…
Read More