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August 29, 2013
Montreal, Canada - A recent study performed at the Segal Cancer Center of Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada has determined that acupuncture can be quite effective in relieving a number of disease symptoms that lung cancer patients regularly experience.
A article published by the Healthcare Medicine Institute notes that the study, which involved 33 patients – 24 with advanced stage lung cancer – demonstrated that pain levels were effectively reduced in more than 60 percent of the participants after one or two 45-minute acupuncture sessions per week, with a minimum of 4 sessions total.
In addition, 30 percent of patients reported improvements to their “sense of well-being” after at least four acupuncture treatments. This number escalates to closer to 70 percent when patients received six or more acupuncture treatments. Hence, there was a positive correlation between clinical improvements and increases in the number of acupuncture treatments received.
Improvements in nausea, nervousness, shortness of breath, drowsiness, and depression were shown as well, and several patients reported a healthy increase in appetite after participating in the acupuncture sessions.
“Biomedical research suggests that acupuncture has a somatosensory stimulatory effect causing the release of endogenous opioids,” the researchers explained, adding that acupuncture also causes electrophysiologic changes in the nervous system that can reduce pain.
The Canadian researchers noted that this was the first study of its kind that exclusively involved lung cancer patients, most of whom had the non-small cell variety of the disease. They were pleased with the results and noted that they hope lung cancer patients, as well as those with other varieties of cancer, will consider this alternative treatment when planning their overall treatment regimen.
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