Deans' stroke musings: Systematic review on acupuncture for treatment of dysphagia after stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Systematic review on acupuncture for treatment of dysphagia after stroke

The conclusion on this is totally impossible except as placebo response. Energy meridians have never been proven to exist.
https://www.mdlinx.com/internal-medicine/medical-news-article/2017/08/11/acupuncture-dysphagia-stroke/7293039/?

Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Ye Q, et al.

The therapeutic efficacy of acupuncture for dysphagia after stroke was evaluated. The researchers demonstrated that in terms of efficacy rate of dysphagia after stroke, the acupuncture group was better than the control group. And the combining result of those researches using blind method was more strong in proof. For further exploration, strict evaluation standard and high–quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) design were required.

Methods

The researchers searched 7 electronic databases from their inception until 31 September 2016.
They enrolled all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) incorporating acupuncture or acupuncture combined with other interventions for the treatment of dysphagia after stroke.
Then they were extracted and evaluated by 2 independent evaluators.
In RevMan 5.3.0 software, direct comparisons were conducted.

Results

The researchers included 6010 patients of 71 papers.
The pooled analysis of efficacy rate of 58 studies demonstrated that with moderate heterogeneity, acupuncture group was superior to the control group (RR = 1.17, 95% CI: 1.13 1.21, Z = 9.08, and P < 0.00001).
Meta-analysis of the studies using blind method revealed that with no heterogeneity, the efficacy rate of acupuncture group was 3.01 times that of the control group (RR = 3.01, 95% CI: 1.95 4.65, Z = 4.97, and P < 0.00001).
In this investigation, only 13 studies mentioned the safety evaluation.