Acupuncture and the treatment of anxiety

Vinicius Macêdo de Sousa

  • Vinicius Macêdo de Sousa Hospital de Doenças Tropicais - HDT-UFT - EBSERH

Abstract

Based on the principle that man must be in harmony with nature, acupuncture is one of the many elements that make up Traditional Chinese Medicine. Acupuncture has stood out as a form of complementary treatment, both for anxiety and for various pathologies. The objective of this work is to evaluate the scientific evidence available in the literature on the effects of acupuncture in the treatment of anxiety and the quality of these studies between the years 2010 to 2020. This work was based on a systematic review of the national and international scientific literature on anxiety and acupuncture in scientific productions published in journals indexed in the databases of Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and the United States National Library of Medicine (PubMed). In general, Traditional Chinese Medicine treatments bring more benefits to the groups studied, especially in long-term experiments, demonstrating that this is a therapeutic possibility for the treatment of people with anxiety. Despite these discoveries, more clinical and systematic studies are needed, with larger samples through basic and clinical research to show the effectiveness or not of these procedures.

Published
2021-06-07