the biological safety of stainless steel needles used in warm-needling生物安全的不锈钢针用于warm-needling.pdfVIP

Advance Access Publication 20 December 2008 eCAM 2010;7(2)259–264 doi:10.1093/ecam/nen066 Original Article The Biological Safety of Stainless Steel Needles Used in Warm-needling 1,2,3 1,2 1 3 4 Sabina Lim , Seunghun Lee , Seung-Ho Yi , Yang-Sun Son , Sung-min Choi and Young-Kon Kim5 1Research Group of Pain and Neuroscience, WHO Collaborating Center, East-West Medical Research Institute, 2Department of Applied Korean Medicine, 3Department of Basic Eastern Medical Science, Graduate School, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, 4Department of Dental Laboratory Science, Pusan Catholic University, Pusan and 5Department of Biomedical Engineering, In Je University, Gim-Hae, South Korea Warm-needling (also called thermo-acupuncture) is a combination of acupuncture and moxibustion. Due to the intense heat involved, there have been concerns over the biological safety of the acuneedles used in the treatment. This paper reports two phases of a safety test. For a preliminary test, we compared the temperature change patterns of stainless steel (SS304) needles and traditional gold alloy needles, which have been increasingly replaced by the former. To verify the effects of the presence of coating materials, the main test involved three different kinds of SS304: silicone-coated, salicylic acid-coated and non-coate