Ameliorative effects of midnight-noon ebb-flow of acupoint application for patients with knee osteoarthritis pain

Objective To explore the ameliorative effects of midnight-noon ebb-flow of acupoint application for patients with knee osteoarthritis(KOA) pain.Methods 60 patients were randomly divided into the experimental group and the control group with 30 patients in each group.The control group used acupoint patch on the affected area,and the experimental group used midnight-noon ebb-flow of acupoint application.Condensed McGill pain scale(SF-MPQ),the effect of obstacles and simplified Chinese version of the Oswestry Index Questionnaire (ODI) were used to evaluate patients' pain and dysfunction.Results The SFMPQ scores of the experimental group 2,4,8 weeks after intervention were lower than those of the control group.The comparison within groups showed that the scores 2,4,8 weeks after intervention were significantly lower than those before intervention.Further comparison showed that the scores of the latter timepoint were lower than those of the former timepoint.Conclusions The application of midnight-noon ebbflow of acupoint can effectively control joint pain of KOA patients,improve dysfunction of patients.Its effect is better than acupoint patch on the affected area,and the effects increased with the increase of time. Key words: Knee osteoarthritis;  Pain;  Functional disorder;  Acupoint application;  Midnightnoon ebb-flow