Literature Review on Alternative Traditional Treatment of Spasmodic Torticollis - focusing on Chinese Traditional Medicine's Journals

Abstract

Our study is to review Chinese traditional medicine"s journals about the diagnosis and treatment of spasmodic torticollis such as category, syndrome differentiation, acupoints of treatment, and herbal medicine. The journal search was performed using the search engine of China Academic Journal (CAJ) and China Doctor/Master"s Dissertation (CDMD) in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from January 1982 to October 2012. Searching key words were the diverse combination of “spasmodic torticollis”, “cervical dystonia”, “Chinese traditonal medicine”, “herbal medicine”, “acupuncture”, and “syndrome differentiation”. The inclusion criteria was all kinds of journals including Chinese traditional medicine approach except for experiment study. The category, syndrome differentiation, acupoints of treatment, and herbal medicine from finally selected journals were extracted and summarized. The fourty-seven Chinese journals were selected finally. The category was divided into wind syndrome, trembling syndrome, convulsive syndrome, and convulsions. The syndrome differentiation was classified as internal stirring of liver wind, yin-blood depletion, invasion of external contraction, uncontrol of governor vessel, internal obstruction of phlegm turbidity, dual deficiency of qi and blood, and blood stasis due to qi stagnation. The combination of acupoints to unblock the meridian and dissipate binds and to tonify governor vessel and repel tremor was mainly used in acupuncture treatment. Galgun-tang or galgun-tanggami was primarily used and the others were the prescriptions to tonify liver and kidney, to calm convulsion, and to dispeling wind-phlegm. We suggests that spasmodic torticollis could be treated using Korean medicine"s approach in Korea.