Acupressure for Kids Helps Relieve Anxiety of Surgery

Acupressure—a sect of acupuncture, using needles inserted on sensitive body points—uses pressure instead of needles providing a calmer, more specific pressure point relief than acupuncture. Surgery is hard enough for the body to go through on its own—especially for a child’s body to go through—without the added stress of the pre-operative state. It makes sense to look to alternative medicine for help because patients awaiting surgery may not be encouraged or able to take sedatives before anesthesia. A new study shows that using acupressure on children awaiting surgery has proven helpful in erasing nerves and inducing the stoic courage needed not to fear the next step.

Published in the September issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, researchers from Yale and University of California at Irvine collaborated to find that pressure points were put to good use in helping patients better prepare for surgery. Made possible by grants from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) as well as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, co authors Dr. Shu-ming Wang from Yale and Dr. Zeev Kain from UC Irvine, note that this clinical trial in acupressure was needed. Acupressure is an easier way to calm children over using the proven method of acupuncture shown in adults, because children are more inclined to have their anxiety spike around needles. 

A group of 52 children between the ages of 8 and 17 about to undergo gastrointestinal endoscopies were separated into two groups: the acupressure group and the randomly controlled “sham” acupressure group. The first group of children had an adhesive bead stuck to a main pressure point between the eyes—known in traditional Chinese acupuncture as the Yan-Teng point—and the second group’s beads were placed over their left eyebrow which is not a known pressure point with any relevance to relieving pain or anxiety.

Dr. Kain, chair of anesthesiology and perioperative care shares his knowledge of the preoperative state of children, "Anxiety in children before surgery is bad because of the emotional toll on the child and parents, and this anxiety can lead to prolonged recovery and the increased use of analgesics for postoperative pain," Kain says. "What's great about the use of acupressure is that it costs very little and has no side effects."

Dr. Kain is correct that acupressure is cost effective for both patients and hospitals, citing that the bead application costs between $0.20 and $0.40 per patient. Dr. Kain continues to share that the procedure of acupressure isn’t rocket science and doesn’t need a professional to disperse, meaning that the doctors or nurses that are already needed in the pre-op process can administer the adhesive beads, “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on….You don’t need to be a trained acupuncturist to do that.”

The group with the correct acupressure beads showed a 9 percent drop in anxiety while waiting for surgery and the “sham” acupressure group had resulted in a 2 percent increase of anxiety during the thirty-minute trial period.

Although the acupressure beads are cost-effective, safe, and carry no side effects, they are not 100 percent worthwhile to make hospitals switch to this mode of alternative medicine. These trials, though they showed some positives, didn’t reduce or dispose the need for sedatives. While sedatives are still more harmful and can cause over-sedation and extreme nausea, the acupressure beads didn’t continue to help any more when they were kept on throughout the surgery and post-op.

If more trials are done and acupressure becomes a standard in waiting rooms across the country, I can see certain squeamish adults asking for the bead stickers than a thin needle to relieve their anxiety and stress due to the surgical process. Even though these acupressure trials haven’t yet eradicated the use of sedatives, researchers (and patients) aren’t giving up hope that they will be able to find a way to tweak the procedure so the patient’s nerves aren’t displayed so easily during the countdown to anesthesia.