Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2011, Article ID 696754, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2011/696754 Research Article Needle-Free Electroacupuncture for Postoperative Pain Management Daniel Lee,1 Hong Xu,1 Jaung-Geng Lin,2 Kerry Watson,1 Rick Sai Chuen Wu,2 and Kuen-Bao Chen2 1 School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC 8001, Australia 2 Department of Anesthesiology, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung 40447, Taiwan Correspondence should be addressed to Hong Xu,
[email protected] Received 17 January 2011; Accepted 24 March 2011 Copyright © 2011 Daniel Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This study examined the effects of needle-free electroacupuncture, at ST36 on postoperative pain following hysterectomy. Based on a double-blind, sham and different intervention controlled clinical experimental design, 47 women were randomly allocated to four different groups. Except for those in the control group (Group 1, n = 13), a course of treatment was given of either sham (Group 2, n = 12), high-frequency stimulation (Group 3, n = 12), or low-frequency stimulation (Group 4, n = 10). All groups were assessed during the postoperative period for 24 hours. The Visual Analogue Scale was used to determine the amount of perceived pain felt by each subject. Differences were found between the means postoperatively at three, four, eight, 16 and 24 hours. Post hoc comparison tests indicated that Group 4 was significantly different from Groups 1, 2, and 3 at 24 hours.