"Motion-style acupuncture," a technique in which patients move their bodies on their own while needles remain inserted, is effective in relieving leg pain and numbness following traffic accidents, a new study found.
Jaseng Hospital of Korean Medicine said Tuesday that a research team led by Kim Jin-hyun, a Korean medicine doctor at the Spine and Joint Research Institute, reached this conclusion after analyzing the effects of combining integrative Korean medicine treatment with motion-style acupuncture. The study, conducted from November 2023 to October 2024, involved 40 men and women aged 19 to 69 who developed leg radiating pain within three days after a traffic accident.
Motion-style acupuncture is an emergency acupuncture treatment that helps recovery of pain and function by having patients move the painful area while needles are inserted, used when movement is impossible due to acute back or neck pain. Leg radiating pain refers to pain or numbness extending down to the legs caused by problems in the lower back or hip joint. It can be accompanied by a burning or tingling sensation below the knee, and after traffic accidents it often appears alongside back pain. In such cases, the pain covers a wider area than when only back pain occurs, interfering with walking and causing major inconvenience to daily life. If it develops into chronic pain, it can reduce quality of life and increase the burden of medical costs.
Patients complaining of leg radiating pain caused by traffic accidents are commonly treated with integrative Korean medicine treatment, which combines drug therapy such as painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs with physical therapy or acupuncture, pharmacopuncture, and Chuna manual therapy. The "Korean Medicine Standard Clinical Practice Guidelines for Traffic Accident Injury Syndrome" recommend acupuncture, electroacupuncture, motion-style acupuncture, and Chuna manual therapy, either alone or in combination, to improve pain and function. While previous research had reported that motion-style acupuncture shows rapid analgesic effects on acute pain, there had been no case verifying its effect on leg radiating pain after traffic accidents through a randomized controlled clinical trial.
The research team randomly assigned the subjects into two groups. Twenty patients received only integrative Korean medicine treatment, consisting of acupuncture, pharmacopuncture, moxibustion, cupping, Chuna manual therapy, and herbal medicine, while the remaining 20 additionally received motion-style acupuncture. The method involved performing motion-style acupuncture on the lower back or buttock muscles once a day for about 10 minutes on the second to fourth day of hospitalization. The change in leg pain on the fifth day of hospitalization was used as the evaluation indicator, and pain level, daily function disability, and quality of life were measured together.
According to the analysis, the group that also received motion-style acupuncture showed better results across all evaluation indicators, including pain reduction, functional improvement, and quality of life. Using the Numeric Rating Scale (NRS), which ranges from 0 (no pain) to 10 (extreme pain), leg pain on the fifth day of hospitalization measured 3.24 points in the motion-style acupuncture group, an average of 2.28 points lower than in the integrative Korean medicine treatment-only group. The Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) was also significantly lower in the motion-style acupuncture group than in the integrative treatment-only group. The ODI is a questionnaire that measures the inconvenience that spinal pain causes in daily life, consisting of 10 items including pain intensity, walking, and sleep, with a maximum of 50 points; a lower score indicates better back function.
The median time taken for pain to decrease by half was 3.5 days in the motion-style acupuncture group, compared with 13 days in the integrative treatment-only group. The hazard ratio (HR) for recovery speed being halved was also about four times faster in the motion-style acupuncture group than in the integrative Korean medicine treatment group.
"This study is significant in confirming that combining motion-style acupuncture from the early stage for patients with leg radiating pain after a traffic accident can bring faster pain relief and functional recovery," said Kim Jin-hyun, a Korean medicine doctor at the Spine and Joint Research Institute of Jaseng Hospital of Korean Medicine. "Going forward, we hope it will help prevent the chronification of symptoms in acute-stage patients and strengthen the clinical evidence for Korean medicine treatment of traffic accident patients."
The findings were published in the latest issue of the Journal of Pain Research, an SCI(E)-class international academic journal.
