Acupuncture Anesthesia for Open Heart Surgery

seminars, books, lectures and demonstrations have inundated physicians. Among the conditions that some of its advocates have claimed to be materially helped or “cured” by acupuncture are headache, diarrhea, bedwetting, swelling, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, high blood pressure, gall bladder trouble, cardiac arrhythmia, impotence, menopause, hemorrhoids, constipation, liver trouble, kidney trouble, colds, low blood pressure and “many more.” When this melange of claims is accompanied by the clutching of the Red Book and the mouthing of the current political quotations-in favor, it approaches travesty and yields the unacceptable mixture of politics and medicine. However, despite an almost automatic rejection by physiologically trained and oriented Western cardiologists of methods that have dim rationales and are promoted by hyperbole, one cannot deny that acupuncture has been used successfully as an anesthetic adjuvant during cardiac surgery, as succinctly and objectively described by Katz. It therefore behooves us to give the technique recognition and to try to explain or at least evaluate it. My colleague, Dr. David C. C. Stark (clinical professor of anesthesiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine) has studied the Katz report and has come to the conclusion that the technique does not appear to provide a wholly satisfactory form of anesthesia. The instability of the pulse rate in response to auditory stimuli and apprehension suggest that afferent stimuli are not blocked. The psychological trauma associated with the procedure in a conscious or semiconscious patient needs to be considered. The depression of the respiratory rate to 8 to lO/min suggests the use of either more meperidine (Demerole) than indicated in the description or perhaps a fair degree of hypothermia (body temperature not provided) with attendant analgesia and some cortical depression.