[Progress of researches on acupuncture manipulation and its quantification]

Abstract

The acupuncture manipulation is an important factor for achieving a good therapeutic effect in acupuncture practice. The authors review recent studies on acupuncture manipulation and its qualification from (a) differences of the therapeutic effects of acupuncture manipulation, (b) quantification of acupuncture manipulations, and (c) instruments for delivering and sampling the analogued parameters of different acupuncture manipulations, computer analysis software, etc. Most studies revealed that different acupuncture manipulations had different clinical efficacies. Meanwhile, researches on the quantification of acupuncture manipulations and some related instruments also have made a bigger progress. Nevertheless,there still exist many problems, such as difficulties of various acupuncture techniques in unification in clinic, stronger personal subjectivity in performing manipulations, etc. We should overcome these problems and conduct more researches, so as to raise the clinical curative effect further.