WebMD Health News May 5, 2000 (Atlanta) -- Acupuncture has been used to treat people in the Far East for thousands of years, so it may strike some people as amusing that it is being studied in the West as a potentially new treatment for everything from back pain to depression. According to some Austrian scientists, erectile dysfunction, or impotence, can now be added to that list. Impotence can be caused by many factors, from imbalances in hormones, to actual physical damage, to psychological or emotional problems. Paul F. Engelhardt, MD, of the Hospital Leinz in Vienna, Austria, and colleagues are in the midst of an ongoing study to see if men suffering from impotence that has more of a mental cause can be helped by acupuncture. Engelhardt presented preliminary findings at a meeting of urologists here this week. Acupuncture involves placing very fine needles in various parts of the body to relieve pain or stress. All 13 men in the study, average age 42, received acupuncture. But they were split into two groups receiving different treatments. One group received the actual acupuncture for impotence. The other group received acupuncture but in areas that werent related to relieving impotence. The researchers did this to see if there was a strong placebo effect, in which the patients have relief from just thinking theyre receiving treatment. The first group, which contained seven men, received two acupuncture sessions a week for 10 weeks using acupuncture with several points for erectile dysfunction that are traditional Chinese acupoints, Engelhardt says.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:59:09 +0000
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