The Short‐Term Effects of Acupuncture on Myofascial Pain Patients After Clenching

Abstract

Pain tolerance in the masticatory muscles increased significantly more with acupuncture than sham acupuncture.

Effects of Acupuncture on Sensory Perception: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Nine of these reported the PPT to be significantly elevated [33,40,41,43,51,64,78,79,83], and one study found no significant PPT increase [50]. Among the 26 studies (74.3%) that assessed the effectiveness of an acupuncture series, 18 (69.2%) showed a PPT increase after treatment [37,38,46,50,52,62,63,68,70,72,74,77,81,82,86,87,91,93] while six studies (23.1%) observed no effect of acupuncture on the PPT [22,27,[47][48][49]96].…”

“…In 23 studies, algometers were equipped with a rubber tip of 1 cm 2 or larger [27, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44-48, 50, 62, 68, 70, 74, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 91, 96], while in five studies tips of smaller sizes were used [49,51,52,72,83,93]. In five articles no information was given about the characteristics of the algometer [22,43,63,77,78].…”

“…Most common conditions under investigation were myofascial pain, associated with the occurrence of MTrPs (8 out 35, 22.9%) [33,38,41,48,50,63,70,83], fibromyalgia (7 out of 35, 20%) [37,44,45,72,81,82,87], chronic neck and back pain (5 out of 35, 14.3%) [22,46,49,74,77], temporomandibular disorder (5 out of 35, 14.3%) [40,43,68,79,91], and experimentally induced delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS; 4 out of 35, 11.4%) [27,47,51,78]. PPT was also used as an outcome measure for the treatment effect of acupuncture in tension type headache [52,93], osteoarthritis of the knee [86], abdominal scar pain [62], plantar fasciitis [96], and syringomyelia [64].…”

“…In the following, the term ''sham'' is used according to the description of the respective publication. Sham interventions were needling at non-acupuncture points with stimulation (17 out of 48; 35.4%) [24, 25, 30, 31, 35, 42-44, 50, 53, 62, 73, 83-85, 94, 95], without or with minimal stimulation (10 out of 48; 20.8%) [22,27,37,44,46,47,57,86,93,95], minimal or no intensity needle stimulation at classical acupuncture points (10 out of 48; 20.8%) [40,44,66,80,88,92,95,97,103,104], non-penetrating placebo needles (12 out of 48; 25%) [28,33,45,52,60,61,72,76,78,79,98,99], or treatment with an inactive laser pen (5 out of 48; 10.4%) [31,48,49,77,95]. In 25 of these 48 studies (52.1%) the effect on sensory thresholds was significantly larger in the verum than in the sham acupuncture group [25, 28, 31, 33, 37, 40, 46, 50, 52, 57, 60, 62, 72, 76, 78-80, 83-85, 88, 92, 93, 95, 97].…”

Management of Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction Syndrome: An Overview

“…(84)(85)(86)(87) Muscle relaxants (baclofen, tizanidin, cyclobenzaprine),opiates (morphine), anticonvulsants (e.g., gabapentin),ketamine, and TCA (e.g., amitriptyline) are also used clinically for TMJ management, but there isno strong evidence for their efficacy. 88,89 Surgical Management: Surgery is seldom needed for TMD patients. A study over 2,000 TMD patients from many practices found that only 2.5% needed TMJ surgery (1.4% arthrocentesis, 1.0% arthroscopy, and 0.1% open joint procedures).…”