April 28th, 2018
Fort Drum, NY
A little over a year ago there was a doc on my team who was also a certified acupuncturist. Her certification was in western medical acupuncture, not traditional Chinese acupuncture. Part of what she did was something new to me called Battlefield Acupuncture (BFA). It seemed a little hokey, but the coworkers she performed it on swore that it helped with pain. At least some of her patients loved it.
BFA is a subset of auricular acupuncture. If you read about the history of auricular acupuncture in the west, the scientific basis for it sounds pretty flakey. In 1957, French neurologist Paul Nogier realized that the ear looked like an inverted fetus and, based on this projection of a homunculus on the ear, picked points where acupuncture would help with the associated body parts.
Uh-huh.
BFA was created about 2001 by a U.S. Air Force neurologist and acupuncturist named Richard Niemtzow. He merged some traditional Chinese stuff with the new French stuff and included his own experience. Basically tiny gold darts are inserted into five specific points in each ear in a specific order. They stay in the ear for 2-4 days before falling out on their own.
Given the current opioid crisis, both DoD and the VA have embraced this eagerly. Anything that works better than placebo to treat pain without (or with less) opioids gets immediate attention. And this works significantly better than placebo. Despite the name, it isn’t really used in battlefield settings much, but increasingly in clinical practice.
There are some pretty harsh critiques of BFA on the web. Most of these say there is little evidence that it works. That is changing as numerous recent (albeit small) randomized controls trials (RCTs) show that there is immediate pain relief for most, diminishing but still noticeable at one week.
The “needles” or darts come in a small plastic applicator. They are sterile and coated in gold which is antimicrobial.
They are really tiny.
The five points are name Cingulate Gyrus, Thalamus, Omega 2, Point Zero, and Shenmen, reflecting appeals to anatomy, Chinese medicine, and modernism.
Even if the science is questionable, I don’t care so long as it works. I had a patient who was setting the alarm on his phone to remind him to take his oxycodone twice per day, everyday, without fail. After a couple sessions of BFA, he was refilling his oxy 3-7 days late as he was skipping doses. Even if it is placebo, it usually helps and does no harm.
Yesterday morning I had the opportunity to take a class in BFA and am now certified to practice it. As part of this class another PA harpooned my left ear at all five points. It actually hurts less than you would imagine. I can’t personally vouch for its efficacy as I didn’t have pain before or after.
In any case, I hope to get some practice in this before I retire from full-time work in July.
I think I’ll get more in mysticism and eastern medicine. Perhaps investigate rolfing, sungazing Reiki, cupping, or maybe moxibustion. And what’s up with burning mugwort? I thought that was something from Harry Potter.
