Open Heart Operation under Acupuncture Anesthesia

Abstract

The history of acupuncture for relieving pain in Chinese traditional medicine could be traced back to the Warring State Period (战国) more than two thousand years ago.[1] Acupuncture was developed and employed for anesthesia in surgical operation in the late: 1950’s. The first type of operation successfully performed under acupuncture anesthesia was tonsillectomy.[2] Since then, acupuncture anesthesia had been employed in various other types of operations, including thoracic operations, such as lobectomy and mitral commissurotomy. We started to explore the possibility of using acupuncture anesthesia for open heart surgery in the late 1960s. A number of technical and physiological problems had been solved during the following decade. Experience in our clinic as well as many others proved that in selected patients and by trained teams, acupuncture anesthesia may be used with advantage in certain operations, including open heart procedures. [3–5] Our experience in a series of 250 open heart operations under acupuncture anesthesia forms the basis of this chapter.