The Impact of Acupuncture on Promotion of Women’s Reproductive Health

Background and Objective: Acupuncture is a key component of traditional Chinese medicine in which thin needles are inserted to special points of body considered as energy channels and leads to pain relief or treat a particular problem. According to the results of some studies, acupuncture can ameliorate reproductive problems and promote female reproductive health although its mechanism is unknown, yet.Method: This a review study. A review of the related domestic and foreign literature and articles is presented in this section. In order to investigate all Iranian studies published so far, we searched in the data banks MEDLIB, IRAN MEDEX, MAGIRAN and SID with some key words including reproductive health, acupuncture and menstrual dysfunction. All available articles from 1991 to 2018 were studies and assessed.In order to assess studies conducted in foreign countries, the data banks WHO, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed and CINAHL were searched with the key terms: menstrual dysfunction, acupuncture and reproductive health and studies performed from 1980 to 2018 were assessed.Findings: Based on the relevant studies, the effectiveness of acupuncture in improving dysmenorrhea symptoms was investigated and the results were really satisfactory. Moreover, it has been suggested that acupuncture relieves the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. A number of studies have addressed the effect of acupuncture on abnormal uterine bleeding including prolonged bleeding with a heavy flow, amenorrhea, bleeding followed by use of OCPs, and irregular menstruation. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of acupuncture in these cases. Other advantages of acupuncture include: treatment of unexplained infertility, inducing ovulation and better results of IVF. In addition, it has been suggested that this method can be useful in those with sperm dysfunction. Some studies on the effectiveness of acupuncture in treating polycystic ovaries have given positive results. Similarly, the result of some studies have indicated that acupuncture be useful in curing pelvic inflammatory disease and removing menopausal symptoms. However, the majority of results are based on single studies. Some people believe that scant clinical studies exist on the effectiveness of acupuncture in treating reproductive dysfunction most of which have weak design with Imprecise criteria.Conclusions: acupuncture is a complicated intervention on which more research with more precise criteria is needed.

Keywords:

Reproductive Health , Acupuncture , Menstrual disorders