Ear Acupuncture May Benefit Patients With Penetrating Neck Wounds

Albuquerque, NM - Proponents of the ancient Chinese needle-based therapy known as acupuncture are rejoicing after the publication of a study investigating its use in patients with catastrophic penetrating neck wounds.

Traditional Chinese ear acupuncture, shown here being used on a healthy 25-year-old man with a headache to prevent total organ failure from meningococcemia, may also slow death from exsanguination by a few seconds after taking a knife to the carotid artery

"We compared ear acupuncture plus usual care to usual care alone in patients with severe knife wounds to the neck," lead researcher at the University of New Mexico's Center for Studies, Dr. Mort Fishman, explained. "Though the subjects ultimately all died, there was an intriguing statistical trend towards slower death in the acupuncture group."

The study, which was published this week in Online Publishing Module #37,211 - Critical Care Acupuncture, involved a randomized convenience sample of subjects with deep neck wounds treated in the University of New Mexico Hospital's Center for Life's Integrative Emergency Medicine Pavilion. According to Dr. Fishman, choosing the right acupuncture points to use was key to the methodological rigor of the study. "We focused on ancient Chinese texts dating back 5,000 years and determined that the ear acupuncture points corresponding to general neck health and also blood vessel integrity were the most likely to yield positive results."

An extremely complicated statistical analysis that only highly intelligent people can understand, shown here almost proving that acupuncture might probably kind of work sometimes maybe

"None of the results were statistically significant in the study," Fishman revealed. "Still, we've got a really good feeling about this. More research is definitely needed."

In addition to the primary outcome of how long it took for subjects to bleed to death, researchers also looked at a number of very interesting secondary outcomes with the help of top statisticians from the North Albuquerque Space Administration (NASA) like Chief of Complementary and Alternative Mathematics (CAM) Allyson Sanders. "After running the data through complicated algorithms with our most powerful graphing calculators, we were shocked to find that subjects in the acupuncture group were a bit less sweaty and also scored slightly higher on a behavioral observation non-verbal patient satisfaction scale administered prior to death. I just got goosebumps."