In issue #5, 2004 on page number 27 of Gan Su Zhong Yi (Gansu Chinese Medicine), Song Yu-fang published an article titled, “Observations on the Therapeutic Efficacy of Treating 318 Patients with Sciatic Pain with Warm Needle & Cupping.” Because sciatica is a common problem in clinical practice for any practitioner doing physical medicine (acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy, massage therapy, osteopathy), a summary of the main points of this article is presented below.

Cohort description

Altogether, there were 502 patients enrolled in this two-wing comparison study. Of these, 302 were male and 200 were female aged 26-70 years. The course of disease ranged from one half month to 20 years, Two hundred four patients had foot shao yang gallbladder sciatica, 256 had foot tai yang bladder channel sciatica, and 42 had pain on both these channels. These 502 patients were then randomly divided into two groups, a so-called treatment group of 318 patients and a comparison group of 184.