Acupuncture Versus Intravenous Morphine in the Management of Acute Pain in the Emergency Department

• Status: Completed
• Trial end date: 2013-03-01
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

Inadequate pain management is a common problem encountered in ED settings. Pain relief medications use is often limited by their side effects. Evidence suggests that non pharmacologic pain relief techniques such as acupuncture can play a central role to treat pain in acute conditions, but their application is still scarce.

• Phase: Phase 2
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: No

Details

• Lead Sponsor: University of Monastir
• Treatments: Morphine

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• Acute onset pain < 72 hours of the ED presentation

• Pain intensity ≥ 40 of the VAS or NRS (ranging from 0 for no pain to 100 for maximum imaginable pain)

• Acute musculoskeletal pain with no evidence of fracture or dislocation, including ankle and knee sprains without signs of severity (ligament rupture, laxity), shoulder and elbow tendinitis, upper and lower limb mechanical pains and lower back pain with no evidence of neurological deficit.

• Acute abdominal pain with no urging surgical intervention including renal colic and dysmenorrhea.

• Acute headache that meets the criteria of primary headache, as described by the international headache society.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Temperature > 37.7°c

• Violent mechanism of trauma

• Patients under anticoagulant drugs or with coagulation abnormalities

• Skin affections (infections, hematoma, dermatosis) that would impair the use of certain acupuncture points

• Patients that were judged enable to participate in the study at the discretion of the treating physician.

• Refusal, inability to consent.

• Inability to assess the degree of pain using the VAS or NRS

• Patients who had received analgesics in the 6 hours prior to the enrollment

• An initial pain score ≤ 40 on the VAS or NRS

• Patients who had presented to the ED in the last 24 hours with the same motif

• Pregnancy