Acupuncture – A Popular Means of Pediatric Pain Management

A lot of parents are turning to alternative therapies such as acupuncture in order to manage pain that their children undergo. Both parents and children are coming around to the idea of thin needles being inserted at various points in order to relieve pain.

Accupunture for Pediatric Pain Management

In a study relating to the use of acupuncture for pediatric pain management, the impact of the treatment on children aged between 2 and 18 years with abdominal pain, limb and back pain, headaches, chest pain, and other indications were examined. As a result of the study, it was found that acupuncture was able to significantly lower pain experienced by the children.

A survey conducted in 2007 found that about 150,000 children had received acupuncture for various problems such as nausea, anxiety, migraine and pain at other sites.

The efficacy and possible benefits of acupuncture for pain management are now so widely recognized that a number of main stream medical doctors are prescribing that their patients try out this option.

Those trained in western medicine are now realizing that complementary treatments can work very well for children, particularly in the case of chronic pain, which seems to be unable to be contained by pharmaceutical drugs that are also not healthy in the longer duration.

Dr Mark McDonald, a pediatric critical-care physician for the University of Louisville, offers acupuncture to his young patients, even though he works in mainstream medicine.

While he maintains that there is no substitute of antibiotics, he is able to acknowledge that there are some things that just cannot be treated by using western medicine, particularly in cases where a person doesn’t respond to usual pain relievers and even narcotics.

Though the critics of using acupuncture for normally needle phobic kids abound, more doctors are coming around to at least considering alternative therapies.