Comment on a Letter to the Editor: Is the Pneumoretroperitoneum Really Developed After Acupuncture?

Dear Editor:

We appreciate Dr. Lee's description ¹ on the practical aspects of acupuncture that we could not describe in our article. ² It was helpful for us because there has been little communication between traditional medicine (Korean medicine) and Western medicine in Korea.

As Dr. Lee wrote, it may be very difficult to induce a pneumoretroperitoneum with acupuncture needles. However, a needle may reach the retroperitoneal space when it is inserted from back in the prone position. We have no idea on the exact origin of “the air” in this particular case, but it might be from room air penetrated during insertion of a needle without any intestinal injury.

When we were submitting an abstract ³ for the poster presentation at a domestic meeting, we had only a brief history that the patient brought when she was transferred from a distant southern city. Later, we were able to get a detailed clinical history on her first admission. At the time of her initial admission, she had fever and right flank pain, which were improved after antibiotics, and at the time of referral to our hospital, she was afebrile.

We found a typing error in our paper from a sentence describing the size of acupuncture needles. We should have deleted the letter “F” from “a gauge of 26–32 F” in the second paragraph of page 1300. Gauge of 26–32 is equivalent to 0.457–0.229 mm in diameter.