Page 13 - CASA Bulletin of Anesthesiology 2019 Vol 6 No 5

Vol.6, No.5, 2019

Isolated Intraoperative Acupuncture Treatments in Orthopaedic

Surgery, A Brief Report

By Stephanie Cheng, MD
Attending Anesthesiologist, Hospital for Special Surgery,
Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA

History

Acupuncture is a treatment system where fine needles are

placed in the specific points on the body to treat a variety of dis-
eases . These needles are inserted into the skin along meridians of
the body and influencing the body’s life force, known as Qi. Acupuncture has had a rocky past.
The beginning of acupuncture started as one modality of a whole host of aspects of Chinese
medicine. The first written source is the Huang Di Nei Jing translated to the Yellow Emperor’s
Inner Classic thought to be compiled and written during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C -220 A.D.).
This text is followed by the Nan Jing, translated to Classics of Difficult Issues which is the first
text that created a unified system and addressed illnesses, diagnoses, and therapeutic needling.
These were followed by a series of texts during the rest of the Han Dynasty and into its peak
during the Tang Dynasty, when acupuncture was disseminated to Korea, Japan, and the rest of
Asia . During the Song and Ming Dynasty, the advancing of acupuncture continued, with re-

search, education, and clinical fine tuning of the previous classic teachings all flourished.

However, during the Qing Dynasty (circa 1822), the emperor ordered that acupuncture no
longer be taught at the Imperial Medical College. This coincided with China’s exposure to west-
ern medicine from the Jesuit Missionaries. Western medicine influences continued into the nine-
teenth century and when the twentieth century rolled around, Chinese medicine was threatened
with illegal status in 1929 by the Guo Ming Dang (Republic of China) government . Despite the
opposition, the practice of acupuncture continued . Then with the rise of the Communist Party
under Mao Zedong, acupuncture was once again made popular by the recruitment and training

of “barefoot doctors” . Training was provided to rural communities in both Chinese and Western
Medicine to treat patients in areas where there were a lack of western trained medical practi-
tioners . This campaign was so successful that at one point during the Cultural Revolution (late
1960s), 70-80% of illnesses were treated with acupuncture or herbs(1).

In the U .S ., acupuncture gained popularity when journalist James Reston wrote of his expe-
rience with acupuncture in an article in 1971 that made the front page of the New York Times .
He describes his pain control with acupuncture after undergoing emergency appendectomy . Fol-
lowing this, public interest blossomed, and many physicians and non-physicians signed up for
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