Does acupuncture work? Surprising research results

Acupuncture may be associated with inserting needles into random places on the human body. In fact, its purpose is to unblock the energy channels through acupuncture stimulation, i.e. specific places on the skin and subcutaneous tissue. The method comes from the Far East, and some people believe that in this way it can eliminate certain ailments, e.g. problems with proper circulation. So far, doctors and scientists have been skeptical about acupuncture, but they may change their minds because of it research results of Chinese scientists.

Does acupuncture help with post-stroke care?

Post-stroke motor aphasia very often affects people who have suffered a stroke. In fact, every third person after a stroke is at risk of this condition. It consists in the fact that a patient who was previously able to speak properly, as a result of cerebral ischemia, loses this ability or it is disturbed in some way. Sometimes this condition goes away, but very often people have problems with speech even a year after a stroke.

Scientists from the First Teaching Hospital of Tainjin University published the results of their research in the journal JAMA Network Open could revolutionize post-stroke care patterns. According to them, acupuncture may be the key to combating aphasia. Scientists conducted research on 231 people aged 45-75 (about 80% of them were men), who were divided into two groups. One of them participated in manual acupuncture, and the other in mock. The latter involves inserting needles into random places.

The research was conducted for six weeks, which resulted in 30 sessions of 30 minutes each. The experiment proved that patients participating in manual acupuncture show a much higher AQ, i.e. aphasia index. The higher it is, the smaller the speech problems. Average aphasia rate after six weeks was 69.66 for the manual group and 61.68 for the sham group. Patients entered the program with an average AQ value of 29.60.