Abstract

ARANGO-VELEZ, VALERIA  and  MONTOYA-VELEZ, LILIANA PATRICIA. Integrative Medicine; effects of acupuncture and its clinical application in allopathic medicine. CES Med. [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.2, pp.283-294. ISSN 0120-8705.

Acupuncture has been practiced in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 3000 years; currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges this practice for the integrative pain management and other clinical conditions. Its application for the chronic and refractory pain management with conventional treatments, allows it to be a useful, secure, effective and pleasant therapy not only for the pain management, but also to decrease the adverse effects of oncologic treatments. In the last 15 years the National Institutes of Health altogether with the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine allowed conducting multiple scientific studies, to enable the identification of the neurologic mechanisms through which acupuncture achieves its therapeutic effects. Nowadays integrative medicine is part of the academic offer of many universities, hospitals and institutions dedicated to the medical education worldwide, with the aim of optimizing the integrative management of the patient, addressing the disease in the holistic context of the being and allowing evidence to determine the clinical application of this type of treatments. In medicine treatments cannot be rejected due to ignorance or lack of information, therefore it’s necessary to be able to validate treatments based on scientific evidence, to allow us to find which are the integrative, secure and effective options so that patients can improve their quality of life.

Keywords : Acupuncture; Integrative medicine; Pain.

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