During the long historical process of more than 2000 years, acupuncture and moxibustion (acupmoxa) analgesia, a component part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), had been playing an important role in keeping people's health and promoting the property of Chinese nation. Because of its wonderful curatives effect, acupmoxa is popular not only in China but also in the neighboring countries. What is the most noteworthy is that acupmoxa is not a simple "technique", but is in conforming to the ancient philosophy and natural science. Acupuncture has been enriched and developed unceasingly by clinic practices. However, the mechanism of acupuncture analgesia and moxibustion are still a mystery and waiting for deeply explaining. Based on BOLD-fMRI, this study focuses on the cerebral activation regions localization during the acupuncture and moxibustion stimulus. Zusanli and Taichong were selected as acupoints to study the mechanisms of acupuncture analgesia. Our works are as follows. (1) We presented a method for addressing the problem of acupuncture analgesia. Traditional Taichong acupoint and 3cm away form the Taichong acupoint were selected to stimulate. The activation of the brain regions was observed by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. From the activation, we found that there were not a clearly differences between the traditional and non- traditional acupoint acupuncture stimulus. (2) A new approach for studying mechanism of moxibustion was suggested. Experimental design was proposed to study the mechanism of moxa. Observations were made during the stimulus of 3 healthy volunteers. We found that the cingulated cortex, sensorymotor cortex, and thalamus were activated during the moxibustion stimulus.
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