Is trigeminal neuralgia treated with acupuncture effective?

  Although trigeminal neuralgia is not life-threatening, trigeminal neuralgia can cause severe facial pain, and if left untreated, it can develop into chronic pain, affecting sleep, causing depression and depression, and seriously affecting the patient’s quality of life. As the disease develops, it can evolve into intractable pain that will haunt patients for years and years. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the occurrence of the disease and receive timely and standardized treatment.  Trigeminal neuralgia is very distressing, and patients usually choose medication at the beginning of the disease, but after taking medication for a period of time, the side effects of medication will become apparent. At this time, most patients want to undergo surgery for further treatment.  Professor Wang pointed out that in the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, some patients will try acupuncture, but due to the fragility of the facial nerve itself, it is easy to stimulate the nerve damage, leading to more serious diseases, even the fibrosis and paralysis of the facial nerve, producing more along the appearance of facial paralysis and other diseases.  Other treatments for trigeminal neuralgia include closure therapy, radiofrequency, and gamma knife therapy, which provide pain relief by selectively destroying the fibers that conduct nociception. The sequelae are blindness, facial nerve palsy, cerebral hemorrhage, etc., and are prone to recurrence, and some patients have poorer results after recurrence and then treated with other methods. Therefore, at present, the most thorough and side-effect-free treatment for trigeminal neuralgia is only microvascular decompression.  The main cause of trigeminal neuralgia is due to the bonding and compression between the nerve and the blood vessel, and drugs are effective for patients with mild symptoms.  Microvascular decompression is the only method to treat the cause of trigeminal neuralgia and facial muscle spasm. The procedure only requires a small incision in the occipital area behind the patient’s ear to expose the nerve compression by the blood vessels, and a special pad is placed between the nerve and the blood vessels to separate the nerve and blood vessels.