Stimulated by Han et al 2019.[1] Photo by Hisu Lee on Unsplash.Chosen because this Korean woman will certainly get neck painif she reads like this for any significant length of time 😉 I was very pleased to see this huge (n>100 000) retrospective cohort study publish online yesterday in Acupuncture in Medicine. I have commented … Continue reading Can acupuncture prevent neck surgery
Stimulated by Liu et al 2019.[1] Photo by Idella on Unsplash.This image is chosen to illustrate the phrase 'like trying to find a needle in a haystack', and it reminds me of the difficulties surgeons used to have in finding embedded foreign bodies. This is a noteworthy case because it is the first report I … Continue reading Laparoscopic needle fragment removal 2019
Stimulated by Baeumler et al 2019.[1] Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash. This paper’s first author is the lovely Petra, who presented at the BMAS Autumn meeting at the Royal Society in 2012. I remember how impressed she was to be surrounded by so many famous busts of scientist heroes. I was busy organising the … Continue reading Temporal summation and acute acupuncture analgesia 2019
Stimulated by Zhao et al 2019.[1] Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash. This paper was published online earlier this week but appeared on my PubMed search this morning. I was planning to write about hemifacial spasm today, highlighting quite a big (n=539) neurosurgical review of MVD (microvascular decompression) from China,[2] but this paper on electroacupuncture … Continue reading Chronic stable angina and point specificity
Stimulated by Tucciarone et al and Choi et al 2019.[1,2] Photo by Jairo Alzate on Unsplash. These two papers popped up on one of my PubMed searches on Monday 22nd July. They are both adverse events related to acupuncture in the region of the spine. One avoidable, and the other probably not, and both in … Continue reading Spinal AEs 2019
Stimulated by Abanes et al 2019.[1] Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash. This is a small feasibility study that came out last month. I saw it on my PubMed searches but could not access full text. It was a single arm (n=16) study, so I felt I was not missing too much by not seeing … Continue reading Perceived stress 2019
Stimulated by Sun et al 2019.[1] Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash. Ever since I started reading sham controlled acupuncture trials in the early 90’s I have focussed most on the adequacy of the treatment (probably in a self-referential way) compared with the stimulus strength in the sham. I saw Jorge Vas’s trial in OA knee published in … Continue reading Parameters of dose for acupuncture
Stimulated by Paim et al and D’Allessandro et al 2019.[1,2] Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash. I selected these trials that were published online on consecutive days last week whilst I was attending a conference in Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It was only after selecting them that I noticed that both trials were conducted in Brazil. … Continue reading Side-effects of cancer treatment – Brazil 2019
Stimulated by Prinsze et al 2019.[1] Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash. New acronyms are guaranteed to get me guessing, but these two were a challenge. They roll off the tongue pretty well as acronyms, but I had to check both! NREs are needle-related events, so that is relevant to the blog, and TTIs are transfusion-transmissible infections ie … Continue reading NREs and TTIs in the Netherlands
Stimulated by Cui et al 2019.[1] Photo by Omer Salom on Unsplash. The whole point of this blog originally was to highlight papers from our own journal Acupuncture in Medicine. This may only be the second time I have done so, and for the first time I have bitten off a laboratory study. One reason for choosing this … Continue reading Atheroma 2019
