Acupuncture: A useful complement of anesthesia?

Since acupuncture provides analgesia it might be expected to reduce the need for conventional anaesthetic drugs during general anaesthesia. In this review we discuss four double blind, placebo controlled studies evaluating acupunture's ability to reduce analgesic or anesthetic requirement. Three studies (from Greif et al., Morioka et al. and Taguchi et al.) examined whether transcutancous electrical stimulation of some acupuncture points reduces anaesthetic requirement. Kotani et al. tested the hypothesis that preoperative insertion of intradermal needles in the bladder meridian reduces postoperative pain and oppioid requirement. Conclusions: none of the first three studies showed that the stimulation of the acupoints produces clinically important reductions in anaesthetic requirement. In contrast, Kotani et al. showed that at least some acupuncture techniques provide substantial postoperative analgesia and significantly reduce opioid requirement.