gms | German Medical Science

Objectives: To preliminarily evaluate the potential benefit of acupuncture treatment based on Multimodal Pain Therapy (MMST) in chronic vertebral pain patients with lumbar pain through a retrospective data analysis.

Methods: This study analyzed treatment data from 197 patients who received one-week inpatient MMST from early 2011 to late 2015. This included 86 patients who received acupuncture treatment after 2014 and had complete PainDetect software data, serving as an acupuncture group with four acupuncture applications each. 113 patients who had not received acupuncture treatment in 2011 served as the control group. Furthermore, pain relief was evaluated using the numerical analog scale (NRS) in both groups.

Results: The additional acupuncture treatment improved the effect of MMST. After patients in the two groups received MMST in the hospital, the mean decrease in NRS score in the acupuncture group was 2.383 points, whereas the mean score in the control group was 1.402 points (P<0.05). Considering the scores of the two groups before admission, comparison of the scores of the two groups at discharge showed that the difference was still significant (P<0.05). The mean value in the pain and its evaluation on mood in the acupuncture group was 3.193, which was higher than 0.445 in the control group (P< 0.05). The mean value of changes in the effects of pain on physical condition in the Chinese medicine group was 1.815, higher than 1.140 in the control group (P >0.05). Pain assessment on the day of treatment showed that the mean NRS scores of patients before the four acupuncture treatments were 5.38, 5.13, 4.16, and 3.68 points, respectively, and the NRS scores after acupuncture treatment were 2.32, 2.12, 1.74, and 1.31 points, respectively, which was more than 50% lower than before treatment (P<0.05).

Conclusion: The additional acupuncture treatment based on the currently widely used MMST is likely to be more effective in relieving patients’ pain, with improvement of patients’ pain-related mental and physical status, and brings more clinical benefits to patients with chronic vertebral pain. Relieving patients’ pain, improving patients’ pain-related psychological and physical state, and bringing more clinical benefit to patients with chronic vertebral pain.