Acupuncture Treatment for Lumbar Disc Herniation

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Herniated disc is a disease that comes with aging, which always comes to prolapse and irritation of the surrounding nerves and the conventional medicine offer non-painful and invasive treatments such as epidural injection, lumbar microscopic discectomy open or laparoscopic surgery of the spine. Acupuncture for centuries is been used as a successful treatment for many diseases and the development of the medicine and better knowledge of the pathological conditions of the organism, now science is able to prove the effectiveness of this, for the patient, easy, almost painless and non-invasive treatment, which besides therapeutic has a strong analgesic effect in the first phase of the treatment.

AIM: This paper attempts to prove the efficacy of the treatment with acupuncture over a herniated disc in order alternative, less painful and noninvasive treatment of the disease.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: The research was performed on 30 patients, of which all have symptoms of lumbar pain in the spine, and all of them have a herniated disc. 29 of them had a herniated disc between the vertebrae L4 and L5, and 26 of them hernia combined L4, L5 and S1. The treatment was performed on the  acupuncture points  BL-24 (Qi Hai Su), BL-25 (Da Chang Shu), BL-26 (Guan Yan Shu), BL-27 (Xio Chang Shu), BL-28 (Pang Guang Shu) , GB-30 (Huan Tiao), BL-40 (Wei Zhong), BL-57 (Cheng Shen), GB-37 (Guan Ming) and BL-60 (Kun Kun), indoors at room temperature of about 25 degrees Celsius.

RESULTS: According to statistics, it is obvious that a herniated disc is almost equally present in both sexes, from 30 patients, 13 were women and 17 men. The number of treatments is different in all the patients, but approximately they needed 8 therapies.

CONCLUSION: According to the research conducted by this paper, based on facts and evidences, acupuncture is a successful therapeutic treatment to treat a herniated disc.