Citation

Kim SH, Kwon CY, Kim ST, Han SY. Integr. Med. Res. 2020; 9(4): e100415.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.imr.2020.100415

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

On November 15, 2017, an earthquake measuring a moment magnitude of 5.5 rocked Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province in South Korea.1 Although more than a year and five months had passed since the earthquake, about 100 victims were still living in temporary shelters by April 2019. Symptomatic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression can persist among many survivors of earthquake for even as long as 8 years after,2 and long-term evacuees (LTEs) in temporary shelters may suffer from psychological distress and numerous health problems, including infectious disease, pain, insomnia, and even premature death.3, 4, 5 However, it is often difficult to provide many evacuees with sufficient continuous mental health and psychosocial support due to limitations on human resources and a lack of stable funding. Ear acupuncture and/or ear acupressure, a treatment modality for both physical and mental health problems,6 is simple to use, effective, and has high utility. International relief organizations such as America's National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) and the organization Acupuncturists Without Borders have already been providing relief activities, using ear acupuncture at disaster sites.7, 8 This is the first report on the medical assistance using ear acupuncture for mental trauma-related symptoms of LTEs at Korean disaster sites.

Three Korean medicine doctors provided the medical assistance with ear acupuncture twice a week for total 8 weeks, at a temporary shelter (Supplementary 1). We used the NADA protocol, a simple standardized auricular treatment protocol originally developed for use in the treatment of drug abuse using 5 auricular acupoints, Sympathetic, Shen Men, Kidney, Liver, and Lung (Supplementary 2).9 After the protocol was used as a stress reduction technique for people exposed to a severe traumatic event following the 9/11 attacks in New York,8 this protocol has been broadly used for disaster relief...

Language: en