Effectiveness of Acupressure Treatment in Pain Management and Fatigue Relief for Gulf War Veterans

Symptomatic veterans will receive standardized acupressure treatment, first with one-thumb pressing applied to the head at acupoints of GV-20 (Bai Hui), EX-HN-3 (Yin Tang), Du-24 (Shen Ting), ST-8 (Tou Wei), EX-HN-5 (Tai Yang). B-2 (Zan Zhu), M-HN-6 (Yu Yao), and SJ-23 (Si Zhu Kong) for ~5 s on each acupoint until the subject gets the sense of soreness and numbness, and the procedure will be repeated three times. The frequency of one-thumb pressing is 120±10 times per minute and the force is 10±2 Newtons. Kneading massage will be applied around eyes and forehead, and face will be swabbed by palm for ~ 5 min. Manipulation of these acupoints is aimed at helping to calm and ease the subject, lighten headache and migraine, relieve fatigue, and alleviate insomnia. Finally, LI- 4 (He Gu), LI-11 (Qu Chi), HT-7(Shen Men), ST-32 (Fu Tu), SP-10 (Xue Hai), ST-36 (Zu San Li), and KI-3 (Tai Xi) acupoints will be one-thumb pressed for 10 min. Manipulations on these acupoints and meridians located on the limbs is to relax muscles, alleviate muscle and joint pain, and improve mobility. This protocol is based on our consultant's previous acupressure research and clinical practice, our pilot case study for CFS patient, and the basic rationale in traditional Chinese acupressure medicine (Yan, 2003; Cao, 2006).

A matter of great concern in investigating oriental alternative and complementary interventions is standardizability and repeatability of experiments. In this proposed study the process of identifying the location of acupoints and underlying meridians for each subject will be carried out using Western anatomy and the World Health Organization's Standard Acupuncture Point Locations (Lim, 2009). The level of manipulation (force and frequency of pressing and kneading) will be monitored by the TN-II manipulation radiometer (Shangxin Medical Science & Technology Co. Ltd, Shanghai, China), which has been successfully used to normalize acupressure manipulation in previous research (Ma et al., 2006). In this manner, the whole treatment design would be standardized as much as possible and could be repeated in the future by our own and other groups.

Reiki: Veterans in the control group will receive reiki treatment with the same dosage (40 min/session, 12 sessions in 6 wks). The practitioner will place the hands on the recipient in various positions covering head, the back of the torso, and the 4 limbs with fixed set of 12 hand positions. These covered areas will then be tapped and stroked, and practitioner will focus his/her gaze on these areas for 2-3 min, through which the healing energy is transferred to the subjects.