For years now, mainstream medicine has understood that acupuncture can help people relieve certain symptoms but they weren’t sure as to how. (And we always want to know the “how!”) That was until now.
Results of a study presented in late November at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America begin to paint a better picture of how acupuncture helps to relieve pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers took pictures of the brain while 18 healthy patients experienced a pain stimulus with and without acupuncture to determine acupuncture’s effect on how the brain processes pain. Researchers found that activation of the brain areas involved in pain perception were significantly reduced under acupuncture.
In a nutshell, researchers say that the findings suggest that acupuncture can help relieve pain. Have you tried acupuncture? What has your experience been with it? Did it help you to relieve pain?