I recently returned from an acupuncture convention and witnessed the benefits of using scalp acupuncture along with specific acupuncture points to treat chronic pain. The lecture included demonstrations on people who had a painful condition since birth or early childhood. MRI’s done on patients with chronic pain revealed an area on the brain that becomes thinner. It was discovered that by needling the scalp, the painful condition would resolve.
Per a recent study, when a person receives acupuncture, the area in the brain affected by pain returns to the state of a healthy person.
“Resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has demonstrated aberrant default mode network (DMN) connectivity in patients with chronic pain, and also shown that acupuncture increases DMN connectivity in pain-modulator and affective-emotional brain regions of healthy subjects.”
