Somatosensory Therapies
In integrative medicine, there is a vast and very heterogeneous group of methods that stimulate the skin and deeper tissues for therapeutic purposes. These include interventions such as acupuncture, massage, and the therapeutic application of heat. These are among the oldest known therapies of humanity and convey their stimuli in very different ways. For example, acupuncture uses thin metal needles, moxibustion uses local heat, and cupping involves various hollow vessels in which a vacuum is created. Chemical substances and electrical currents are also used for stimulation— the former in foot baths, mustard oil chest compresses, and capsaicin-based heat patches, and the latter in transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), which is also widely used in modern pain therapy.
Although all these methods appear very similar from a phenomenological perspective—in all cases, the skin is stimulated and the patients always feel it—there is currently no uniform nomenclature to describe them scientifically. At the Insula Institute, we refer to these methods as somatosensory therapies. This term expresses that, from a neuroscientific perspective, all the mentioned methods result in stimulation of the somatosensory nervous system, which mediates our bodily sensations. At the same time, it is still a hypothesis to be proven that this stimulation is not just a side effect but rather the central mechanism of action of these therapies.
The clinical evidence for somatosensory therapy methods is sometimes very strong. For example, cupping can alleviate chronic pain, and acupuncture can successfully treat even severe conditions such as angina pectoris, depression, and strokes. Massages can positively affect both maternal health and the incidence of preterm births and birth weight of the children. However, the mechanisms underlying all these effects are not yet fully understood.
The main goal in the research of somatosensory therapies is to elucidate their central nervous mechanisms of action in humans.
Mechanisms of action of acupuncture
Acupuncture is one of the oldest therapeutic methods in medicine. Texts from traditional Chinese medicine mention acupuncture as early as 100 BC. Sharp stones and pointed bones were probably used in a similar way to acupuncture as early as 6000 BC (White & Ernst 2004). Acupuncture therefore has a wealth of therapeutic knowledge dating back more than 2000 years. Modern research, such as the GERAC study from 2007, has also confirmed its effectiveness for certain pain disorders (Haake et al. 2007). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of acupuncture is repeatedly questioned. The traditional explanations of how acupuncture works are often rejected in conventional medicine. One aim of the Insula Institute is to explain the mechanisms of action in the language of Western medicine and science. A first step towards this is to open our eyes to why the effects of acupuncture are not so easy to research using conventional Western research methods .
One scientific field in which research into acupuncture has made particularly great progress is neuroscience. In addition to countless animal studies, studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been carried out on humans for more than 20 years, which have shown early on that acupuncture - regardless of which acupuncture point is pricked - has a calming effect on those areas of the brain that are increasingly activated in cases of chronic pain and psychological stress (Hui et al. 2010). At the Insula Institute, we also conduct our own fMRI studies on acupuncture in cooperation with the Hannover Medical School. Among other things, we are researching whether different acupuncture points have a specific effect on our autonomic nervous system.
Literature:
M. Haake, HH Müller, C. Schade-Brittinger, HD Basler, H. Schäfer, C. Maier, HG Endres, HJ Trampisch, A. Molsberger. "German Acupuncture Trials (GERAC) for chronic low back pain: randomized, multicenter, blinded, parallel-group trial with 3 groups" in Arch Intern Med. Vol.167, no.17,pp. 1892-8, 2007. here
KK Hui, O. Marina, J. Liu, BR Rosen, KK Kwong "Acupuncture, the limbic system, and the anticorrelated networks of the brain" in Auton Neurosci. vol. 157, no.1-2, pp. 81-90, 2010. here
A. White and E. Ernst "A brief history of acupuncture" in Rheumatology, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 662-3, 2004. here