Acupuncture Research in Austria during the Last Ten Years

Acupuncture (ac.) has been known and practiced in Austria for about 23 years, mainly clinical research in ac. therapy, but ac. analgesia for surgery is a recent development. Ac., practiced by M.D.'s only, was legalized, and Austrian scientists studied characteristics of the ac. points from various angles, including histological construction, alteration of stomach motility, erythrocyte increase, neural and humoral mechanisms. The author and his associates, since early 1972, have performed tonsillectomies, tooth extractions, thyroidectomies, pacemaker implantations, cesarian sections, hernia repairs, appendectomies, heart surgery, and other types of operations with the use of ac. analgesia. It is usually preferable to combine small dosages of drugs or local anesthetics with the analgesia, but ac. does show a stabilization of vital parameters, and this is where future emphasis should be placed. Ac. is also very effective for post-operative pain control. The basic idea of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute is to involve specialists in specialized problems, and the institute calls on specialists primarily from the University of Vienna rather than to center in the institute itself the various specialized fields of medicine. Ac. analgesia does not work on everyone, and the best subjects are found to be persons with a low pulse rate, low pain threshold, and a high rate of anxiety – many of them also good hypnotic subjects–and they must have a special indication for ac. analgesia rather than conventional anesthesia due to allergies or other complications. Psychological factors play a large role in pain control on humans, although real ac. is significantly superior to placebo ac. The Boltzmann Institute emphasizes research on therapeutic ac. rather than on ac. analgesia, but both of these types of research deserve further interdisciplinary and international cooperative investigation.