Is Acupuncture Effective for Chronic Lower Back Pain?
The amount of time people spend sitting is steadily increasing.
Whether it’s computer work, school classes, or other sedentary activities, prolonged sitting inevitably puts a strain on the lower back, leading to a rise in chronic lower back pain cases.
Many patients find relief through acupuncture, moxibustion, and Chuna therapy at Korean medicine clinics, experiencing satisfactory results.
"Scientific studies confirming the effectiveness of acupuncture in improving chronic lower back pain are continuously being published."
A joint research team from the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine and Harvard Medical School in the U.S. has used brain imaging technology in clinical studies to reveal that acupuncture treatment alters brain structure in chronic lower back pain patients, leading to symptom improvement.
This study was conducted in collaboration with Professor Vitaly Napadow’s research team at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard Medical School, a world-renowned research institute in brain and medical imaging.
The findings were published in NeuroImage, a leading journal in the field of brain imaging.
Using MRI scans, the study objectively observed changes in brain structure following acupuncture treatment in patients with chronic lower back pain.
Key Findings:
1️⃣ Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to identify the primary somatosensory cortex region (referred to as the "lumbar region") activated when the lower back was stimulated.
2️⃣ T1-weighted imaging revealed that as lower back sensitivity decreased, the volume of gray matter in the lumbar region increased.
3️⃣ After six acupuncture treatments over four weeks, brain scans showed that only the real acupuncture group exhibited both recovery of lower back sensitivity and a reduction in gray matter volume in the lumbar region.
4️⃣ Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) was used to examine white matter structure in the brains of chronic lower back pain patients. The study found that only after real acupuncture treatment did the white matter abnormalities in the lumbar region recover along with lower back sensitivity.
