%0 Journal Article
%T Labor Pain Treated with Acupuncture or Acupressure
%A Oroma B. Nwanodi
%J Chinese Medicine
%P 133-152
%@ 2151-1926
%D 2016
%I Scientific Research Publishing
%R 10.4236/cm.2016.74014
%X <div style=\"text-align:justify;\">
	Opioid-dependent women have an 80% to 90% unintended pregnancy rate, almost double the overall unintended pregnancy rate: 40% globally and 51% in north America. The prescription drug abuse milieu increases the possibility opioid abusing laboring patients. In 2012, neonatal abstinence syndrome occurred in 5.8 per 1000 hospital births. Non-pharmacological labor pain management (NPLPM) is especially recommended for laboring patients with a history of substance abuse. Therefore, literature review was performed to elucidate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture, noninvasive electro-acupuncture (EA), and acupressure in labor pain management. Compared to standard intrapartum controls, bilateral EA at JiaJin or Sanyinjiao significantly reduced visual analog scale (VAS) pain scores 30-minutes post intervention (p &lt; 0.01) and Stage 1 active phase labor length (p &lt; 0.05). EA achieves shorter Stage 2 labor than patient-controlled epidural analgesia (p = 0.05); and 10-point lower VAS pain scores and reduced cesarean delivery rate than no-analgesia controls, p &lt; 0.05. Current evidence indicates that EA should have a role in NPLPM, and that acupressure may have a role in NPLPM. Nevertheless, future RCTs could strengthen the argument for increased EA and acupressure use in NPLPM.
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%K Acupuncture
%K Acupressure
%K Cesarean Delivery
%K Complementary Therapies
%K Electro-Acupuncture
%K Labor Pain Treatment
%K Manual Acupuncture
%K Non-Pharmacological Labor Pain Management
%K Obstetrics
%U http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=72468