Purpose
To examine the effects of a group model of acupuncture treatment on pain for joint replacement patients in an acute care setting.
Methods
In a large midwestern hospital, group physical therapy is provided to joint replacement patients. Orthopedic surgeons added acupuncture to the standard post-operative care for total knee and hip replacements provided through the Joint Replacement Center (JRC). Acupuncture is introduced in the pre-hospital class for surgery preparation and provided immediately after physical therapy on post-operative days one and two. Pre- and post-acupuncture treatment scores for pain are recorded in the electronic medical record. Mean differences in self-reported pain scores were analyzed using a two-tailed t-test.
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Results
Between 1/1/2010 and 9/30/2010, 654 acupuncture treatments were provided to 427 unique patients. The sample included 252 women and 172 men ages 27 to 95 (mean 65.5; SD 12.4 (women) and SD 11.33 (men)). Average pre-treatment pain scores were 4.1, and average post-treatment scores were 2.3, demonstrating a 45.3% decrease in self-reported pain level (p<0.001).
Conclusion
Group acupuncture significantly decreased self-reported pain in a sample of post-operative joint replacement patients. The addition of acupuncture to the JRC model of delivery is a distinguishing characteristic of the services provided by this midwestern hospital that competes with other hospitals to provide this elective surgery, making it unique among the community options.
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.