Objective: Medical acupuncture is increasingly recognized for reducing postoperative pain, nausea and emergence agitation. Anesthetic induction is an ideal time to perform acupuncture in an effort to reduce the adverse side effects of surgery. Acupuncture is safe, inexpensive and does not lengthen the duration of anesthesia. There are however no published reports of how often patients will choose intraoperative acupuncture when given the opportunity to do so.
Methods: A retrospective review of all surgical procedures performed by one surgeon over 12 months was done. This yielded 401 unique patients ranging in age from 3 months to 21 years with a mean of 6 years. Five of these patients had emergent surgery and 396 patients had scheduled surgery; there were a total of 822 surgical procedures performed on these individuals. Intraoperative acupuncture was offered only to the scheduled surgical patients.
Results: 388 of 396 (98%) parents chose to have intraoperative acupuncture done for their child. No complications of acupuncture were encountered.
Conclusion: These results demonstrate strong acceptance of intraoperative acupuncture by parents. We hope this report encourages surgeons to become trained in medical acupuncture.
Keywords: Acupuncture; Children; Postoperative pain; Surgery; Tonsillectomy; Tympanostomy tubes.
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