TIME: Study: Acupuncture May Change the Way the Brain Perceives Pain

(photo by S. Ross, TIME magazine)

Pain is one of the most challenging, elusive obstacles that affects individuals of all kinds. Often, regardless of health history, we see members of our Iowa City community (and well beyond) plagued by pain that is not being managed with standard care. Pain is especially challenging for practitioners because it is completely subjective and in many cases, leads to long term drug use which may or may not be effective.
This past week, TIME published an article reviewing research undertaken at the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. The purpose of this study was to document a specific pattern of brain activity during acupuncture that may represent an accessible pathway for addressing pain. At Health On Point, not a week passes when a patient who has been struggling with pain - the sort of pain that may be debilitating or affecting quality of life - finally finds relief with Rachel's acupuncture and lifestyle counseling. If you or someone you love is in pain, please call for a consultation today.

An exerpt from the TIME article:
The idea of pricking your body with needles in order to relieve pain seems nothing if not counterintuitive, but thousands of acupuncture patients swear the treatments are effective in addressing pain of all kinds.

But how does it work? How much of the relief is due to the placebo effect — the mere perception that the needles are actually dulling pain — as opposed to a real biological change in the way nerves signal the brain to pain?...

“This study helps to clarify the brain's function in terms of how or where it processes pain and where that processing can be modified by the application of acupuncture intervention,” says Dr. Michael Brant-Zawadzki, an adjunct professor of radiology at Stanford University, commenting on the study.

What's most exciting, says Brant-Zawadzki, is that the brain regions identified in the fMRI scans may lead researchers to find a more standardized approach to treating pain that may help more sufferers. “If we could find one part of the brain that modulates the pain response in the vast majority of individuals, we could address pain through acupuncture or drugs or even sham acupuncture,” he says, “and we would have a better approach to the pain conundrum than we currently have.”

Interested in the full article? You can read it here.