Auriculotherapy to reduce occupational stress in primary care health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic: a randomized controlled clinical trial

Introduction: occupational stress is a chronic strain that can cause physical, mental and behavioral changes in health workers. Auriculotherapy is a possible instrument for minimizing the effects of work stress. Objective: to evaluate the effectiveness of auriculotherapy in reducing occupational stress in health workers from the Family Health Strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: randomized controlled clinical trial in two groups: auriculotherapy group for stress and placebo group. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to assess data normality. The repeated measures Anova test and the Tukey post hoc test were applied to normal samples. The Friedman and Durbin-Conover tests were used in the group with non-normal distribution. For the therapy effect size, the Cohen d index was calculated. A significance level of 95% and p-value <0.05 was considered. Results: the auriculotherapy group showed a reduction in occupational stress of 16.3% and 23.7% after the third and sixth sessions of auriculotherapy, with a Cohen d index of 1.12 (large effect) and 1.82 (very large effect). ), respectively. Conclusion: auriculotherapy proved to be effective in reducing occupational stress in health workers of the Family Health Strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is suggested that new studies be developed during and after the pandemic in order to improve the quality of life of health workers.