Insomnia & Acupuncture

Insomnia: habitual sleeplessness; inability to sleep.
Auricular acupuncture: A type of acupuncture in which thin needles are inserted at specific points on the outer ear to control pain and other symptoms. It is thought that the outer ear contains a “map” of the whole body and that specific points on this map match up with certain parts of the body.

In 2007, a study was done in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine where 878 papers were searched. Six trials (402 treated with auricular acupuncture (AA) among 673 participants) met the inclusion criteria to study insomnia.

The recovery and improvement rates produced by auricular acupuncture was significantly higher than those of Diazepam. The rate of success was higher when auricular acupuncture was used for enhancement of sleeping hours up to 6 hours in treatment subjects. The efficacy of using Semen vaccariae ear seeds was better than that of the controls while magnetic pearls did not show statistical significance.

6 commonly used auricular acupoints were Shenmen, Heart, Occiput, Subcortex, Brain and Kidney

Conclusions: Auricular acupuncture appears to be effective for treating insomnia

Check out the full study here!
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38050061.pdf