Parents whose children are about to have surgery are an understandably nervous bunch. Some of that anxiety, though, can be relieved through simple acupressure, according to doctors at the Yale University medical school in New Haven, Connecticut.
"It's very straightforward," says Shu-Ming Wang, who is both an associate professor of anesthesiology at Yale and a licensed acupuncturist. "Anybody can do it. You don't need to be an acupuncturist. You can do it for yourself, you can do it for your patients, just simply rub the forehead in one particular acupuncture point."
Wang and her colleagues studied the effectiveness of the technique among a group of parents whose children were about to receive out-patient surgery under general anesthesia. Among 61 parents, 28 of them had a bead taped onto the "yingtang point," right between the eyebrows. The rest wore the bead at a sham point above their left eyebrow. Twenty minutes later, the doctors asked a 40-question survey designed to measure anxiety.
Although all of the parents were about equally nervous before the acupressure, the group that wore the beads at the yingtang point was significantly calmer afterward, according to results published in Anesthesia & Analgesia, an International Anesthesia Research Society journal based in Cleveland. The doctors also measured the parents' heart rate and blood pressure, but found them to be unaffected by the bead.
The yingtang point is not one of the key locations in traditional acupuncture, Wang says. The researchers chose that spot because a previous study in Greece reported promising results from rubbing volunteers' foreheads, but that study was done in a relaxed laboratory setting rather than in a hospital.
Wang, 46, has been studying how acupuncture could be combined with Western medicine for about seven years. Her original research in the area showed the effectiveness of acupuncture in reducing nausea among children waking up from anesthesia, she says.
This time, she and her colleagues opted to use a bead because it is less intimidating than the traditional acupuncture needle, although the benefit might not last quite as long, she says. It's important that the procedure is non-threatening and easy to apply, as she would like to see doctors across the country adopt it as part of their regular practice even if they're not trained as acupuncturists.
As a medical student in New Jersey, Wang says, she started seeing the side effects of medications. "I started thinking, maybe if I could combine the best of the East and the best of the West, it would be a good approach to future patient care."
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