[The peripheral afferent pathway in acupuncture analgesia].

Experiments demonstrated that vascular occlusion of the upper arm could not prevent the analgesic effect of acupuncture needling of a point on the hand from being mediated to other regions of the body as manifested by raising the thresholds of pain at those regions, and infiltration of procaine in the deep tissues around the point of acupuncture abolished entirely the analgesics effect.

Abstract

Experiments performed on 21 normal adults demonstrated that vascular occlusion of the upper arm could not prevent the analgesic effect of acupuncture needling of a point on the hand from being mediated to other regions of the body as manifested by raising the thresholds of pain at those regions, and on the other hand infiltration of procaine in the deep tissues around the point of acupuncture abolished entirely the analgesic effect, suggesting that nerves but not humours were responsible for the mediation of the effect. The analgesic effect from test points has been shown to be bilaterally distributed and wide-spread but somewhat segmental in nature.