Shoulder Pain Relief with Acupressure

This is the web page that will focus on shoulder pain. This page will include background, research, articles, how to start using the points, blogs, facebook, twitter connections and all other networking information. This page will be open only to people who are part of the acupressure study program and are allowing us to assist them to get the best personal results possible and to track their progress.

The link to the points for relief of shoulder pain are found below. In general you should include the points for shoulder pain along with the specific points for the part of the body or type of shoulder pain that you are working with.

Shoulder Pain

Shoulder

Shoulder Bursitis  

 Shoulder Frozen

Acupuncture & Frozen shoulder
Frozen shoulder (capsulttis) is generally considered to be a spontaneous, progressive pen-arthritis over the shoulder joint. The exact causes of this condition are still not fully under-stood, and conventional treatments include cortisone injections and physiotherapy, neither of which are particularly successful in the majority of cases. For this reason, researchers at the Department of Anaesthesiology, Taipei Municipal Chung-Hsing Hospital con-ducted a study to determine the relative pain relief effect of electroacupuncture (EAP), regional nerve block (RNB) and the combination of EAP + RNB for frozen shoulder.

One hundred and fifty patients with newly diagnosed frozen shoulder were randomly divided into 3 equal groups. Group I patients had RNB with stellate ganglion block and suprascapular nerve block by 1% xylocain 10 ml. Group II patients had EAP with local acupoint Chien-Yu, Chien-Ching, Chien-Nei-Ling, Ah-Shih Hsueh treatment and Group III patients had RNB+EAP performed with acupuncture first, then followed by the regional nerve block.

Range and mobility of the patients’ shoulder movements were checked in all methods, and pain assessed using the four graded Bromage score for pain assessment- Grade I for completely pain-free; Grade 2 for slight pain (i.e. pain on motion); Grade 3 for moderate pain (i.e. pain on silence)and Grade 4 for severe pain (i.e. need analgesics).

The range of shoulder joint was also re-corded. Patients were requested for second treatment if pain recurred. The onset (time from injection to maximal pain relief), duration (time from injection to grade 3) Bromage score and side effects were also recorded.

The results showed that the combined electroacupuncture and RNB had significant high pain control quality, longer duration, and better range of movement of the shoulder joint than that of electroacupuncture or RNB performed alone. The results show how conventional and complementary medicines can work side by side to produce a superior therapeutic effect than either one can by itself.

(1) Rust M, Cohen LA (1994) Anaesthesia. 49 (supplement): 16-23
(2) Andrzejowski j, Woodward D. Semi-permanent acupuncture needles in the prevention of post-operative nausea and vomiting. Acupuncture in Medicine November 1996 Vol 14, No 2 68 70