• Nuno M P de Matos, Daniel Pach, Jing Jing Xing, Jürgen Barth, Lara Elena Beyer, Xuemin Shi, Alexandra Kern, Nenad Lukic, Dominik A Ettlin, Mike Brügger, and Claudia M Witt.
• Institute for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, University of Zurich and University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Clinic of Cranio-Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery, Center of Dental Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
• J Pain. 2020 Mar 1; 21 (3-4): 440-454.

AbstractAcupuncture is a complementary and nonpharmacological intervention that can be effective for the management of chronic pain in addition to or instead of medication. Various animal models for neuropathic pain, inflammatory pain, cancer-related pain, and visceral pain already exist in acupuncture research. We used a newly validated human pain model and examined whether acupuncture can influence experimentally induced dental pain. For this study, we compared the impact of manual acupuncture (real acupuncture), manual stimulation of a needle inserted at nonacupuncture points (sham acupuncture) and no acupuncture on experimentally induced dental pain in 35 healthy men who were randomized to different sequences of all 3 interventions in a within-subject design. BORG CR10 pain ratings and autonomic responses (electrodermal activity and heart rate variability) were investigated. An initial mixed model with repeated measures included preintervention pain ratings and the trial sequence as covariates. The results showed that acupuncture was effective in reducing pain intensity when compared to no acupuncture (β = -.708, P = .002), corresponding to a medium Cohen's d effect size of .56. The comparison to the sham acupuncture revealed no statistically significant difference. No differences in autonomic responses between real and sham acupuncture were found during the intervention procedures. PERSPECTIVE: This study established a dental pain model for acupuncture research and provided evidence that experimentally induced dental pain can be influenced by either real acupuncture or manual stimulation of needles at nonacupuncture points. The data do not support that acupoint specificity is a significant factor in reducing experimental pain.Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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